Ukranian Jr Game Developer Mentorship Initiative

Several years ago, Dmitry Paliy, a game developer at Proletariat Inc, began connecting video game industry professionals with students in his home area in Ukraine to help them develop skills in whatever discipline they were interested in. Students were interested learning programming, art, 3D modeling, and game design, as well as general professional skills like resume building, team communication, and the use of the English language in a working environment. Once the conflict in the Ukraine began, the mentorship program continued, but with a heightened sense of urgency, as many of the students have been displaced from their homes and are now urgently trying to develop skills with which they can secure their futures in more stable Western countries.

Since then, the mentorship program has become more formalized and many more mentors began volunteering, but one remaining obstacle is that many interested students don't have adequate hardware to even run games, let alone run industry-standard programs like Photoshop, Maya, or Unity. Even in the best of circumstances, the minimum hardware can be expensive, but getting it to some students worldwide has been an additional challenge. Some of the mentees can only run the bare minimum of programs and, during the summer, we had a waitlist of students who wanted to participate but couldn't as they had no hardware at all. Thus, we are raising funds to get these students the hardware they need to develop their skills! The funds will go directly toward purchasing PCs, tablets, and laptops for the students and shipping donated equipment.

Thank you!

Meet some of the Mentors:

Stef Wu

Stef is a Product Manager in the gaming industry passionate about using data insights to make games better for players and developers alike. She loves competitive social games and strategy board games (the longer the better!), and hates pie charts.

Caleb Wheeler

Caleb is a QA Manager with industry experience dating back to 2009. He's worked on a number of games, including Rock Band, World Zombination, Spellbreak, and World of Warcraft, among others. He's traveled with Community teams, schmoozed at industry events, recorded voice-over, and even done a bit of motion-capture acting. Caleb is also a tattoo collector, an avid tabletop gamer, and the drummer for Salem-based punk outfit, One Fall.

Jack Fader

Jack is a Product Manager who has worked in the tech industry for 7 years, the last two years in the games industry. Working on projects like Spellbreak, World of Warcraft and others while mentoring students on product market fit and feature design. He is a huge RTS fan and is always ready to talk about Starcraft or nerd out on history trivia.

Ben Wu

Ben is a Gameplay Programmer who has been developing games professionally for three years and mentors students in Game Design and basic Programming. He has worked on games including Valorant and World of Warcraft, his favorite games include Persona 5, The Witness, and Undertale. When not at his desk, you can often find him climbing rocks!