The Boise State University football team has shown people that there’s more to Idaho than just potatoes 🙂 MetaGeek is proud to be a Boise, Idaho company, and equally proud to say that the majority of the people who work for us went to school or are currently attending BSU.

Although the “blue turf” has made BSU famous, the College of Engineering is also becoming nationally recognized, thanks to large donations from Micron Technology (another Boise company). Micron donations focus mostly on Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, the foundation of their company, and they want to support and develop local talent in those areas. However, the Computer Science Department at Boise State has financially struggled to grow due to lack of general education funding as state budgets decline – but, the department has great teachers and an ever-growing student enrollment demand.

Two and a half years ago, MetaGeek made a commitment to help our local university thrive and decided to sponsor the BSU CS Department student lab. Our funding would cover the cost of maintaining and upgrading all of the equipment that the students need to learn in the lab. At the time we made the decision, MetaGeek only had ten employees and not a lot of money in the bank. We briefly considered leaving it to the bigger, more established software companies in the area to help build the CS Dept. But, since we’re self-funded and don’t have investors pushing us to grow MetaGeek as fast as possible, we decided we CAN do cool stuff like sponsor the BSU CS Student Lab, and we did.

Today, I’m excited to see the results of our donation sponsorship funding. Two of our software engineering interns have successfully graduated from BSU’s CS department and are now full-time employees, and we have three more BSU interns from BSU’s CS Dept (along with an intern from University of Idaho, and a Marketing Intern from Meridian Technical Charter High School).

The ribbon cutting for the MetaGeek Computer Lab

Also, last year Dr. Alark Joshi joined Boise State, and now we regularly have lunch meetings with a local data visualization expert.

Students inside the MetaGeek Computer Lab

MetaGeek is proud to be actively engaged in building our hometown tech community, and we would like to encourage everyone to be involved in their own local communities as well.