Pathways to Success: From LiftOff to Hack Club with Antonio Archer

Last month, a student somewhere in America opened a box containing twelve pounds of candy. They had earned it by logging twelve hours building a productivity tool for their desk. The person who designed the reference program, approved the tool’s design, and shipped the candy was Antonio Archer, a Launchpad alum, nine months post graduation from LiftOff with our inaugural cohort, now working as a Gap Year Fellow at Hack Club in Vermont.

Three years ago, Archer was an 11th grader in Philadelphia who had just let go of his plan to become an astronaut and wasn’t sure what came next.

Alongside Python came interview coaching: technical and non-technical, structured response frameworks, and repeated practice with a coach. This practice would be the difference in a three-round interview process.

Archer joined Launchpad in 2023, during his junior year of high school. Technology had always interested him, but the tangible kind (Raspberry Pi boards, soldering irons) things you could hold. Software wasn’t on his radar yet.

“I was always interested in technology. I’m more into physical technology, like Raspberry Pi, soldering,” he says. “Once I had a bit of doubt about the astronaut path, software felt similar enough that I was able to hop ship.”

That proximity mattered. Launchpad didn’t ask him to abandon what he already loved, instead, it gave him a bridge from it. And the program’s structure made the leap practical: after-school hours didn’t compete with anything else on his schedule, and he was paid for his time.

Archer describes 101 as his first entry point. 101 gave him his first programming language, and something less expected: a vocabulary for talking about himself professionally.

“101 was a lot better because it taught elementary Python. I didn’t know any programming languages, so actually getting sat down and learning a programming language was really nice.”

Ask Archer which part of Launchpad he credits most, and the answer is immediate: LiftOff.

At the end of 101, Archer began an internship at Accenture as a consultant. It wasn’t a technical role, but he identifies it as one of the more formative stretches of his Launchpad experience.

“I do feel like it was really necessary for my growth journey outside of technical abilities,” he says. “Besides the network, I definitely feel like I got better at presentations, pitching ideas, standing in front of people saying, ‘Hey, I thought of this, this is why you should try to fund it.'”

He later interned at Seer Interactive for five months, where he gained critical experience as an AI Innovation intern.

Ultimately, it was Hack Club that peaked his interest.

The Hack Club opportunity arrived the way opportunities often do at Launchpad: as a link in the Slack, posted by Nick Imparato, Program Director, for anyone who wanted it.

But that link existed because of a relationship built a year earlier: Launchpad was first introduced to Hack Club through the Catalyze Challenge Community, where Hack Club was a Round 3 winner and Launchpad a Round 1 winner, and the two connected at a conference convening organized by Catalyze.

In June of last year, Reem Khalifa brought one of Hack Club’s all-girls hackathons to Philadelphia and co-hosted the hackathon with Launchpad. “It was a great success,” Reem says. “I got to meet a bunch of people on the team, and Nick, and a few others. It’s just been super great collaborating with you all over the past year.”

That partnership is why Launchpad students were on Hack Club’s radar at all and why, when the Gap Year Fellowship opened, the application landed in a Philadelphia Slack channel. 

Hack Club is a national nonprofit network of student-led coding clubs and hackathons, known for treating young technologists as capable builders rather than students to be managed. Their Gap Year Fellowship brings a cohort of recent high school graduates from around the world to Burlington, Vermont for a year to design and run programs for other students.

What Archer experienced as a series of interviews, Reem describes from the other side as one of the most selective processes Hack Club runs, with hundreds of applicants for a few dozen spots.

The process ran roughly three months across four stages: a written application; a conversation with a current Gap Year Fellow; a “You Ship, We Ship” submission, which is an open-source, deployed project of the applicant’s own design; and a final interview with Hack Club’s managers.

Looking at the structure next to Archer’s Launchpad portfolio, one thing is clear: it’s almost a perfect fit. Pitch something technical you built, that’s LiftOff, plus the presentation skills from Accenture. Design a program and defend it to a CEO, that’s the pitching muscle, again. Hold your own across three rounds of interviews, that’s 101’s interview coaching.

“Mostly LiftOff,” he says, when asked what prepared him. “But 101 did prepare me for the interviews. The whole practice we went through with our coach, learning how to do technical interviews, non-technical interviews. That really helped.”

Reem heard the outcome from Zach Latta, Hack Club’s founder. “I was really, really excited when Zach let me know that one of the new gap years for our batch would be Archer, coming from Launchpad.”

In practice, the work of a Gap Year Fellow can look like a full day coding a submission platform, or calls with Hack Clubbers about how their projects are going, or running a workshop. It can also mean getting on a plane. In-person hackathons are a major part of the work, and fellows own them end to end: venue, budget, attendees, run-of-show, sleeping arrangements, even the midnight surprise. The cohort lives together in Burlington, all recent high school graduates from around the world, working, cooking, and learning together. 

One of Archer’s recent projects was a “You Ship, We Ship” program. A fellow designs a challenge, students around the world ship real projects against it, and Hack Club ships something back: a prize, a laptop, a flight to a hackathon.

Archer’s challenge, Thing on Desk, asks students to build something for their desk that helps them stay productive or track their time. A physical clock. A website that logs hours or reminds them to drink water. Anything, as long as they ship it. Archer built the submission site, designed the review flow, and now approves the projects himself, funding prizes from the real budget Hack Club gives each fellow, which he calls “our own organization within the organization.” Hence the candy: twelve pounds of it, shipped to a student who logged twelve hours.

This is the part that’s hardest to teach and easiest to underestimate. Archer arrived with drive and technical curiosity that were entirely his own. As Reem puts it, “He already had it within him. Being able to learn about Hack Club’s opportunities and apply — that connection is huge. Launchpad definitely gives them that boost.” 

The fellowship runs one year and Archer is already thinking about what’s next. 

“A lot of the people [who] went through this last year are going to MIT and Stanford. I do feel like I’m going to be set for my future. I just don’t know if it’s a great job offer or an application to a high-level school.”

That’s a good problem, and it’s not the one he had in 11th grade.

Asked who he’d recommend Launchpad to, he pointed at a version of himself: a motivated 11th grader with room to go through the whole program, or a more experienced student who could start further along. And Hack Club? “Any technical person who’s unsure about their next step. Hack Club has a lot of connections to basically everything and everywhere technical in this country, the world, even. It’s a nice gateway for high-level students who are unsure on where to go next.”