Thu 22 Jun 2006
With all the meetups and events happening around Boston (see the sidebar at geeksinboston.com), I’m starting to feel like the tech community here is doing pretty well. But one important constituency I rarely see is students. This seems odd, since there are usually lots of recent graduates; especially at entrepreneur-focused events like the startup meetup. Still, at the technical events and even BarCamp, it’s normal to see only 1 or 2 students.
On one hand, it’s understandable that students will naturally tend to act within their existing, convenient, local university community rather than a larger, more amorphous Boston techie community. On the other hand, the presence of great universities is clearly a sustaining influence for this city’s go-read-your-books vibe, and a source of many valuable research and startup partnerships. So why can’t I think of more than 2 students who might be worth recruiting for part-time or internship work? The theory is that a competent student can, with some supervision, work passionately and productively for cheap.
One possible explanation is scarcity. The average computer science student probably expects a job at a big, stable corporation that will offer them well-packaged, skill-appropriate work for a year or two while they learn. Thirty years ago, that corporation was Digital Electronics in Maynard, MA; now it’s Intel, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Monster now occupies the former home of Digital, but probably hires far fewer college graduates than any one of these big, West coast companies. People who don’t need this sort of two-year training cycle before becoming productive hackers are naturally rare; and if we have to fetch back from California the ones who do, that’s an added challenge.
If competent students are scarce, are we doing enough to connect with them while they’re still in school around here? It’s one thing for a big company to set up a table at a job fair or schedule interviews at a school’s career placement office. It’s quite another for there to be a strong network of relationships between people in companies and universities, such that a professor will automatically refer her top students to work with startups run by her friends. Do we need more of the latter? How can we get it?
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July 31st, 2006 at 10:35 pm
One of the large advantages that the big tech companies on the west coast have is visibility. At all the career fairs I’ve been to, these companies (plus IBM, nVidia, et all) have been planting themselves as the best places to work upon graduation. Most students don’t have the foresight to deduce the advantages of working at a startup over a large and stable company. In fact, most of the students that I’ve talked to (which is relatively recent, as I graduated last winter) are not interested in working at a startup. The reason? I’m not sure. Personally, I envy the idea.
The problem of visibility is two sided. For instance, I am very interested in locating a startup to work at. Finding one is nearly impossible (in fact, it is this effort of attempting to locate that landed me on this blog.) I am currently working in Pittsburgh, where there is no startup culture whatsoever. The rest of my network from university has moved to the west coast. After a cursory glance at some research (i.e. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup_centers.html ) I have come to realize that Boston is the best opportunity for me outside of the SV area. But where does one start? Clearly I would prefer employment as a precursor to relocating to Boston, but the startup world is seemingly opaque from the outside.
That being said, it seems like there are a number of resources linked from this blog that may be the answer to my questions.
Please feel free to email me with any advice or questions.
jwrichard@gmail.com
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:16 am
Indeed, I have been hunting multiple websites to see what startups are there out here in Boston area. I also check Boston Business Journal and other business publications, and check the names mentioned in their articles/ surveys/ads. Still, it’s obvious that here in Boston it seems to be much more under the cover than out there in West.
September 29th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Hi all! I too, like the first poster said, landed here while searching for Boston startups. Please forgive me if the following is disjointed, I’m still waiting for the morning dose of caffiene to kick in.
Ever since I had an interview at one earlier this year (which sadly, I did not get the position), my interest in startups has been picqued. One way to find a startup has been to look at the company listing at various office parks in the area, then research them on the web. I was a little disappointed to find that there are only a couple of companies within Cambridge Discovery Park.
Currently, I’m working as a temp in the corporate headquarters of a company(unfortunately, I dont believe there is much call for an admin at a startup so the search continues) in Lexington but there are various startups in the nearby buildings. In fact, a new pharmacuetical company with a very Web 2.0 website just went into the building next door within the last 2 weeks.