How City Tutors Became Daisha’s Career Launchpad
The first real lesson Daisha Davis learned about breaking into tech didn’t come from a coding tutorial. It came from realizing that talent moves faster when someone opens a door.
A friend from NYC Tech Pipeline sent her a link just after she had finished Future Code, a free six-month city-funded bootcamp that helped her rebuild her confidence. The link was to The City Tutors, a mentorship network she had never heard of. It looked simple: a form, a list of mentors, a promise that real people would pick up when she reached out. “I signed up not really knowing what it was,” she said. “I just knew I needed someone on the other end.”
Daisha had been coding since middle school, but the distance between loving it and landing a full-time role felt impossible to cross. “I didn’t go to Harvard or Stanford,” she said. “And I didn’t see many people who looked like me in tech. It felt like a boys’ club.” She needed a bridge that didn’t rely on luck or a cold LinkedIn message disappearing into silence.
That bridge turned out to be a network of mentors, ten in total, each holding a different key.
Some early matches were “practice reps,” she admits, learning how to prepare, what to ask, and when to follow up. Even those first tries mattered. Karthik Swaminathan (IBM) mapped the labor market and pointed to on-ramps. Elakian Kanakaraj found the weak joints, arrays, strings, and common patterns, and pushed her to simulate interview pressure. Priya Gupta (Goldman Sachs) reframed her nontraditional path as an advantage if she specialized. Divya Gupta (MongoDB) handed over fundamentals she had missed in school and study scaffolds for data structures. Alexandra Dickerson (Coinbase) delivered the market reality check without sugarcoating: high-volume applications, targeted networking, consistent practice.
With the basics tightened and her approach sharper, the cadence changed. Andrew Quan became a Thursday standing date with weekly mock interviews that turned panic into pacing. Matthew Cline, an actual interviewer, helped her lower the heart rate that used to derail answers. In tandem, John Liu (Fanatics) rebuilt her résumé line by line and walked her through database preparation so the story on paper matched the skills she was proving under pressure. Together, those three turned practice into performance: poise in the session, clarity on the page, and a plan for what to fix next.
As her mentorships deepened, City Tutors brought Daisha into rooms that stretched those new skills. Partner events with Amazon and AIG helped her test what she was learning, how to introduce herself, build a connection, and talk about her work with clarity. “The first event I went to, I was nervous,” she said. “But then people remembered me. They followed up. That was huge.” Each conversation helped her practice her story and see herself inside the professional spaces she once found intimidating.
Meanwhile, Daisha kept applying for roles on her own, and Google was the first major company to respond. That email did not come from an event connection; it landed because the work added up. “I don’t think I would have heard back months ago,” she said. “My résumé and my confidence weren’t there yet.”
Now the changes are visible. She walks into rooms steadier, uses the time well, and the right people are listening: senior engineers, hiring managers, and team leads at major firms. They answer her messages, take meetings, and offer concrete next steps. What began as a form and a list of names has become a working system. Mentors sharpen the craft, events build presence, and her applications carry a stronger voice.
“I don’t know where I’d be without City Tutors,” she said. “Access to people at Meta, MongoDB, AIG and Coinbase, people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. That access changed everything, and now it’s opening doors.”