Like many other college students, 19-year-old Ian Jennings Jablonowski treks to rock concerts and plays videogames. But the East Brunswick, N.J., native also designed his first website when he was 13. Now, he's part of a new project trying to reshape New York's job market.
Michael Galpert, left, co-founder of Aviary, with summer intern Tal Safran from Herzeliya, Israel, at the office of the 17-person Web company.
He's among a dozen local students working this summer through HackNY, a new organization that hopes to steer more graduates in computer science, math and related fields to New York City technology start-ups instead of the well-worn path to Wall Street.
Many of the best New York college graduates in quantitative fields are often scooped up by big companies such as IBM and Google, and increasingly by Wall Street firms relying on computerized trading and statistics. "In New York, there's such a large pipe that's been constructed for 100 years to take people and bring them into finance," said Chris Wiggins, a HackNY organizer and a professor in Columbia University's department of applied physics and applied mathematics.
Mr. Wiggins said some of his students who take finance jobs haven't been happy with their decision.
According to a 2009 survey of students at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, for example, the largest group of students—36.8%—went to work in financial services. An estimated 17% went to work in software-related jobs.
Mr. Jennings Jablonowski is spending his summer crunching data and prepping new potential features for bit.ly, a nine-person company in Manhattan's Meatpacking District that allows people to easily swap and track Web links on Twitter and other social-networking sites.
Another HackNY fellow, Princeton University student Christopher Triolo, 20, said he is re-evaluating his chosen career in finance just a week into his internship with database firm 10gen. "This really opened my eyes," he said about the HackNY program. (The word "hack" traditionally refers to a reconfigured computer program, and it now serves as a catch-all tech term for clever problem-solving using limited resources.)
The program started this winter after a meeting among Mr. Wiggins, New York University professor Evan Korth and Hilary Mason, a former academic and chief scientist at bit.ly. The three had separately been trying to encourage more links between academia and New York technology companies, and came up with the idea of a 24-hour student "hacking" competition, paired with a summer fellowship.
The 12 HackNY fellows were chosen—naturally, with the help of a computer program Ms. Mason wrote—from more than 100 applicants. The companies pay the students $400 a week, and they are offered free housing in an NYU dorm thanks to the New York chapter of the Internet Society, a nonprofit, and a $37,500 grant from the Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that encourages entrepreneurship.
The fellows will also spend at least one evening a week participating in workshops to learn technical skills, and practical skills such as how to land investors for their own tech companies. "I don't want to just feed my kids to the wolves," said Mr. Korth, referring to the HackNY students.
This is the first real-world work experience for many of the HackNY fellows, and at small start-ups they can jump in and do meaningful work right away. Interns also have a chance to try out the famously loose culture of technology companies. Plasma TVs, Xbox videogame consoles and wardrobes of T-shirts and jeans are work staples. "Compared to a traditional job, start-up life is different," said Tal Safran, 26, a HackNY fellow who just finished his junior year as an NYU computer-science major.
Start-ups say the HackNY program gives them a better shot at hiring top students when they graduate. Financial firms pay newly minted graduates compensation deep into the six figures, compared with pay of $80,000 and up, excluding ownership stakes, for start-up jobs, according to professors and technology executives. These people say Wall Street careers have lost some of their luster after the recent financial downturn, but for many students the financial sector is more stable and more socially acceptable than telling their parents they're going to couch surf for six months and write computer code.
The participating companies also say they want to contribute to the long-term vitality of the New York tech community, which has always played second fiddle to California's Silicon Valley as a tech hub.
"New York is really a hotbed for start-ups, but students don't necessarily know that just yet," said Michael Galpert, a co-founder of Aviary, a 17-person Web company where Mr. Safran is interning. The HackNY program, Mr. Galpert said, shows students "that they don't have to go on the West Coast to spend their summer working with cool start-ups. They can do that in New York."
No comments:
Post a Comment