TechGen Community Update: October 2016
October was a busy month for TechGen (but then again, aren’t they all??). It’s our first fall running the platform and we learned that while both students and companies are eager to connect, needs and timelines are much more varied compared to spring. So we’re working to adapt to this different hiring season.
In the meantime, we’ve been expanding and supporting the TechGen community by going to campuses (like Wellesley College to talk about the Entrepreneurial Journey) and attending events across the community (like Greentown Labs Demo Day).
We’ve also been preparing for our few final events of 2016: Teasers & Trivia with LogMeIn, UnpitchEDU and Intro to the Boston Ecosystem with General Assembly. As for campus stops, we’re planning to make it to Babson, Bentley and MIT before the end of the year as well!
Benjamin Bungert created our company- and student-focused and Slack Channels (email Ben if you want in!). These forums have proven to be great places to ask and answer questions as well as to share relevant events.
And on the partnership front, we’re really excited to announce that we’ll be working with DataXu and First Republic Bank. More details to come on both of those partnerships. We’ll also continue to work with echobind on the platform! echobind is a local dev shop that built the TechGen platform we launched last March (and that we are so proud of!). Because they believe in the value of great talent and our mission, they will continue to work with us to make TechGen’s online marketplace fantastic.
As we fail, learn, iterate and succeed, we’ve realized that how we talk about TechGen needs to reflect what we’re doing. TechGen has morphed into more than an intern marketplace, even though that remains core to our mission. So when we realized the story we were telling wasn’t quite lining up with what we were actually doing, we phoned a friend. About a week ago, we sat down with Mike Troiano to refine TechGen’s positioning statement and mission, because we can look like a lot of different things. So here it is:
TechGen is the bridge between New England’s best university students and its top healthcare and technology companies. Our mission is to create personal connections between members of these two communities that serve the interests of both, and the local innovation economy as a whole.
Boom. We can drill down deeper into what that means and how we act as that bridge — through connecting students and companies via an intern marketplace and providing access to the innovation community through networking events and educational workshops.
So that’s what we’ve been up to! If you have thoughts on our positioning statement, questions, etc. feel free to reach out! Sarah@thetechgen.org
