Kayaking at Corte Madera. Sailing near the Golden Gate Bridge. Spending countless hours writing code or testing software for security vulnerabilities.
There’s plenty of recreational fun awaiting Laura Biester ’16 (Philadelphia) and Adam Canady ’16 (Iowa City, Iowa) in California this summer. Then there’s the real fun, the kind that involves embracing technological innovation with cutting-edge startup companies.
Add Biester and Canady to a growing list of tech-savvy Carls who continue to proudly wave the banner for Carleton’s computer science program. The talented tandem will spend three months working for Silicon Valley tech startups as part of a nationally recognized fellowship program coordinated by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), a venture capital firm in Menlo Park.
The KPCB Program sifts through nearly 2,500 applications from more than 200 of the nation’s top colleges and universities to select its fellows, which are placed on three tracks: engineering, product or design. Both Biester and Canady will be among the largest group, 60 engineering fellows spread throughout the San Francisco Bay Area—Biester with Gumroad (digital goods), Canady with Synack (security testing).
Beyond the paid summer internship, fellows also get to socialize with peers in a vibrant city and enjoy private KPCB events with keynote speakers like venture capitalist John Doerr (Amazon, Intuit, Google) and Mike Abbott (former vice president of engineering at Twitter).
“A lot of the big companies recruit out of these colleges and universities, and they’re ones that students will see all the time—the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Students don’t get to see startups, but there’s a real challenge and opportunity in working for these amazing companies with only two to 50 people on staff,” says Justin Sayarath, an analyst at Kleiner Perkins and program manager for the summer fellowship.
“And having access to venture capitalists—hopefully it inspires the students to be entrepreneurial. Maybe not now, but in the future, they’ll think about pursuing their own companies, their own startups.”
For Canady, a computer science major, it’s a perfect match for his intellectual curiosities. As a kid who grew up “playing with Legos and taking things apart,” he’ll devote his summer to security and penetration testing.
“Before someone does it for real, it’s a lot of fun to get to break other people’s stuff and get paid for it,” Canady says, smiling.
Both Biester and Canady heard about the coveted program through fellow Carleton computer science whiz Ken Schiller ’15, who was an engineering fellow with Indiegogo last year. Comparing notes with Ivy Leaguers while fishing for full time jobs in the Bay Area is a nice side perk of the program, Sayarath says. Carleton students may also have an advantage in an intimate startup environment since the one-on-one mentorship is similar to what they’ll have experienced in Northfield classrooms.
Biester says landing the fellowship showed her that tech companies are “looking for students who engage in creative challenges outside of class.” It’s why she pushed herself to develop new skills as part of Carleton’s DevX (Developers Exchange) Club. The evolution of her personal website became a major point of pride throughout the KPCB interview process.
“They’re going to be working with you nine hours a day for all of summer. They want to bring someone in who is really excited about what they’re doing,” Biester says. “At a smaller startup, I expect to be put to work and thrown in the deep end.”
While Canady also has a Twitter internship under his belt, his acceptance into the KPCB program is a welcome reminder of how far he’s come at Carleton.
“I hadn’t written a single line of code before I came here. It’s been a 100 percent shift in what I can do,” Canady says. “Working with other people at Carleton has completely changed my views on how to be self-motivated and seek out more responsibility. When you’re in that kind of environment, around high-reaching people, you’ll push yourself to be successful.”