[alumNY News] Help alumNY get jobs and/or become a Mentor
Happy middle of February. I’ve got a bunch of fun stuff for y’all this month.
My requests to y’all for things I need help with.
Join the hackNY Jobs Working Group
If you missed it, we've welcomed Steven Lu to the hackNY board. Steve and I are teaming up to work on building Steve Gattuso h`13’s alumNY job proposal from 2021. The TL;DR if you don’t remember, we want to be able to provide a high quality job placement service to alumNY and fellows while also moving hackNY towards being financially stable through this model. I am looking for help with this effort. Steve and I meet every Thursday at 2:30pm for a 30 minute working session to drive this forward. If you want to get involved DM me on slack and I’ll add you to the invite.
Help us place fellows
As it has been for the last few years, placing fellows has gotten really difficult. Long gone are the days Chris or Evan being able to call a founder and then a fellow would have a job. With the shrinkage of the junior market, we’ve been struggling to find places to put our incoming fellows. I’ve got 7 amazing fellows that I’m looking to match. If you work somewhere that can hire a hackNY fellow I would love to chat with you. Shout out to Randall Hunt h’11, Katie Chou h22, Dan Cadden h15 and Devon Peticolas h`12 who are all currently interviewing fellows.
Become a mentor
It’s getting closer to summer! We are looking for our new team of mentors. As always our mentors live in NYU housing for free alongside our fellows. You get to make a huge difference in how the class of 2025 experiences their summer. Applications close on March 15th. Apply at https://forms.gle/h4eeQkfSUnVJv6Ny7.
Community Updates
hackNight at NYC Resistor tonight
We’re taking over the NYC resistor tonight (Feb 20th). We’ll be crashing their weekly open house to host our monthly hackNight. Doors open at 6:30. RSVP at https://partiful.com/e/I4v6epbaN9bQVZOX4bnT. I am refurbishing a lamp and you can come watch me try not to electrocute myself.
h’24 hangouts
This month saw two separate reunions for the class of 24. Robert Sunderhaft h’24 pulled up to the NYU Abu Dhabi visiting Pauline Wee h’24.
After hanging out with Robert, Pauline also went to Treehacks and reunited with Leo Huang h’24, Luna Chen h’24 and Angela Yuan h’24.
Pauline posted in #raves: been meeting / chatting / hanging out with so many hackny peeps and just feel so grateful for the community!! can now no longer live without walters lolzy tweets and our misc slack channels and cute newsletters. also count this as my open invitation to anyone who happens to transit through abu dhabi and wants to visit nyu (in abu dhabi) -- would love nothing more than to show you around / treat you / tour you around abu dhabi!
**Elle Mundy h13 is on Tour**
Elle has been performing in her band for the last few months. She’s been sharing her events on her blog: [https://exch.gr/](https://exch.gr/). Gloria Zhu h24 captured this great photo of Elle performing earlier this month.
Hire an alumNY
Name: Dana Fein-Schaffer
Location: Boston, MA would highly prefer remote or hybrid roles
Technologies: Figma, Adobe XD, JAMA, Jira, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Resume
Portfolio
slackNY handle: Dana Fein-Schaffer
Notes: I'm graduating from my master's in UX/human factors in May and am looking for full-time UX roles when I graduate, especially in the medtech/healthcare space:
Highlights from the #jobs channel
Padma Iyengar h`24 posted a great question in the slack asking for advice on deciding between 2 roles. It’s a long thread full of great advice, but I want to pull some snippets to share in the newsletter:
From Ali Mohamad h`21:
- Big company credibility is very real; spent the last six months looking for a new job and the number of headhunters / recruiters / resume screens i was an impressive candidate for I think was substantially helped by working somewhere universally recognized
- As @jwoos said I think the issue with working at a big company is that you’re not working at the company, you’re working on your team, and on some level your impact as an IC becomes a partial consideration in tandem with what essentially boils down to “politics” on both your teams level and your managers level; I think your work speaking for itself is more heavily weighted at a startup which weirdly enough might feel more secure because that’s something you have control over. Personally, I think a lot of my negative experience at [redacted] which inspired the urge to find a new job stemmed from how unfamiliar this kind of interpersonal / workplace politics-maneuvering I was really ill-equipped for was and how yucky and demoralizing it felt.
- I think that career trajectory after your first fte role is a really tricky thing to wrap your head around as you’re deciding on your first role, but at the end of the day the actual work, your side projects, and your network are all contributing factors in addition to your employers name; the decision you make, especially given whatnots a presumably successful and effective series e startup able to give comparable competitive comp to [redacted], is not necessarily a liability as I understand it, it just means that other factors will have to carry more weight when you try and find a new job; I think that’s kind of the decision to make is “where do I want to put in / offload effort in the future” rather than “which company is better”
There is a lot of great info in that thread, but it’s specific to the companies in question, so you’ll have to go look at the slack to learn more.
That’s it for alumNY updates this month. As always let me know if you have anything you’d like to share with our community.
Best,
Shy h`14
P.S. Thanks for all the birthday wishes. Fun fact, but today is Randall’s birthday. Make sure to wish him happy birthday in person if you come to tonight’s hackNight.