Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but today was yet another amazing day on the IT Grand Prix.

We started off this morning finding out the results of yesterday’s competition. As you’ve no doubt seen by now, we tied for third. While we’re disappointed about the results because of our competitive nature, it’s hard to get too upset about not winning; we were able to play a small part in helping a group of determined homeless men in DC get back on their feet.

Today started out with a much simpler clue than yesterday (which allegedly took us 40 minutes to figure out). We were the first team out the door and the first to arrive at NPower New York.

NPower is the organization Microsoft Learning is working through to pair us up with the different nonprofits throughout this race. NPower New York also has a program called Technology Service Core (TSC). The goal of TSC is to help train underprivileged young adults in the New York area, mostly Brooklyn and the Bronx. They take the attendees through several weeks’ worth of training, with a focus on moving from a “job track to a career path” – from working at Starbucks to database administrator.

The day started with all of the members of the IT Grand Prix serving as a guest panel for the invited alumni. We learned about their experience at TSC as well as their experience in the real world after graduation. We served as mentors, sharing our experiences and our personal stories. They were very curious, and wanted to know and understand how we built our IT careers.

From there the attendees were broken into groups of 5 and placed in different conference rooms. Each team moved from room to room answering questions and sharing information about our areas of expertise. Our areas were SharePoint and SQL Server. The attendees were incredibly engaged and engaging about what we had to share. They asked amazing questions about technologies, wanting to understand what the technologies do and why they should be interested in them. On top of that, they were all very interested in how we personally were able to make the transition from the non-IT field to an IT career. Even having lunch was a pleasure as we were able to make a personal bond with certain attendees, and we were blown away by the passion, smarts and attitude the attendees displayed. (In fact we’d have loved to have written letters of recommendation for many of them.)

We felt we performed well, but regardless of the final results of today’s competition – it’s still not about us. It’s about the people we’ve been able to meet and work with. This was yet another fantastic day on the IT Grand Prix.