A semester abroad has long been an option for university students looking to get out their comfort zone, explore a new culture and experience a different way of living. More recently, universities have offered students the opportunity to work in Washington DC to immerse in politics and Los Angeles to experience the entertainment industry.
For students interested in technology and entrepreneurship, there's a new option: An immersive trip to Silicon Valley.
Several of Chicago's top tech talent-producing institutions, including Northwestern University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Chicago (among other schools nationwide) have started offering career-focused programs in the Bay Area. The trips, which range from a three day trip to a quarter-long program, offer students a chance to immerse in the epicenter of tech and startup culture, explore post-grad careers, and as well as experience a city that's been transformed by the growth of tech companies.
"Just as when I was in France when I was in undergrad to learn about French culture, this is immersion into Bay Area culture," said Liz Gerber, co-leader of Northwestern's Bay Area immersion program, and an associate professor of design. "The culture of innovation. It’s not that it’s unique to San Francisco, but it’s pervasive."
Just as when I was in France when I was in undergrad to learn about French culture, this is immersion into Bay Area culture
And while bringing Illinois' top tech talent to the heart of Silicon Valley may not bode well for retaining talent in Chicago, local schools say students take what they learned to build ventures on campus. It's also a way for schools to engage alumni founders and tech workers at top companies, with the hope of bringing them closer to their Midwest alma maters.
Northwestern University opened a campus in San Francisco last fall. The space holds classes for two schools (Medill School of Journalism and McCormick School of Engineering), as well as alumni events. Medill graduate marketing and communications students had classes there this fall, working on marketing research projects for companies such as Airbnb and Quora. An inaugural program that focuses on tech, culture and applying design thinking to challenges in the news and media industry, just got underway for undergraduate journalism and engineering students.
Joe Harari, a sophomore mechanical engineering student at Northwestern, chose the program to try out design thinking and journalism, two topics he hadn't previously explored (most recently he's been working on automotive tech). Given the concentration of tech jobs in the Bay Area, he also figured it would be a way to "feel out the area" as a potential location to start his career.
The stories he's heard from alums across a variety of industries and career paths has been the most beneficial part of the experience so far.
"Previously in my mind it was, you’re a mechanical engineer, you can build a train or plane or airplane or electrical system, but getting into the [stories] of actual people, not job descriptions or roles...that number of potential roles has expanded," Harari said.
Gerber noted that the immersion program has allowed the university and students to better connect with alumni in the Bay Area. They're bringing in Northwestern alums, including a venture capitalist and a Facebook employee, to offer real-world challenges and provide mentorship throughout the term. Gerber hopes connecting alums with current students will nurture new relationships that extend back to Evanston.
"We have these new populations of Northwestern alums that haven’t been tapped before," she said.
Better connecting the alumni network in the Bay Area to students in the Midwest is a goal of UIUC's Silicon Valley immersion program as well.
UIUC started their annual program in 2009 after a conversation between the then dean of the college of engineering, Ilesanmi Adesida, and Affirm founder, former PayPal CTO, and UIUC alum Max Levchin about "the need to expose student to the other successful entrepreneurs and the Silicon Valley ecosystem," said Jed Taylor, director of operations at UIUC's Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC).
It's since become a popular program among innovation-minded students: Tayor said they typically have about 200 students apply for 25 spots on the trips, which run in January over the school's winter break. On the most recent trip, students visited Tesla, Y Combinator, Yelp, Andreessen Horowitz, and Bloom Energy, among other tech companies, and met with notable UIUC alums, including Levchin, C3 IoT founder Tom Siebel, Gigster founder Roger Dickey, Malwarebytes founder Marcin Kleczynski and Fetch Robotics CEO Melonee Wise.
While UIUC has long sent talented engineers to the Bay Area, these trips have boosted the ecosystem back on campus. Students founders connect to investors out West, while other students are inspired to launch their own startups when they return, said Taylor.
"Often we have students come back to Champaign and immediately get to work," he said. "Four years ago we visited a coworking space in San Francisco and one of the students came back to Champaign and started work on one in downtown Urbana modeled after the one in Champaign. That location is now a key part of the Champaign-Urbana entrepreneurial ecosystem."
Luis Rodríguez Escario, an engineering exchange student from Spain spending his senior year at UIUC, cut short a trip home to Europe to go on the Silicon Valley immersion trip, because he said it would be a "dream come true" to check out top tech companies. He'd dabbled in creating his own products before, including a web platform for the private foster care system he created in Spain, but this trip solidified his interest in startups.
"Before the trip, I was already interested in entrepreneurship, but after it I've decided to do something related [to startups], not just looking at entrepreneurs from the other side of the street while sitting in my cubicle working for a big company," he said over email.
Silicon Valley isn't the only place where students are jetting off to experience entrepreneurship. University of Chicago offers undergraduate "career treks" which are three day trips over the winter and spring break to check out a new city, network with alums, and better understand what tech companies look for in candidates. While they've offered a San Francisco program for the past five years (and the numbers of UChicago students interning at Bay Area companies doubled this past summer), their trek to Seattle has included stops at Amazon and the Surf Incubator, and treks to Toronto and Singapore are focused on business.
That said, Chicago is an up and coming tech hub that fiercely competes for talent with Silicon Valley (and just about everywhere else in the country)--about 10 percent of UIUC's graduating engineers head to California. Do annual trips to San Francisco, and deeper connections with Bay Area alumni, run counter to retaining talent in Illinois?
"Obviously Silicon Valley is an important part of the tech story nationally," said Alya Adamany Woods, director of ChicagoNEXT, a department of World Business Chicago focused on growth in the tech sector. "Our hope is [students] take what they learned in those four years and decide to apply that to joining a company or starting a company in Chicago. And if they don’t make that their first choice, maybe they’ll make that their second choice in five years."
She noted that while alums of Illinois universities might leave the state after they graduate, in a study with LinkedIn, World Business Chicago found Big Ten alums (which includes UIUC) tend to return to Chicago after five to 10 years out of school.
To better connect with this "Chicago diaspora," as Woods called it, this past month, Mayor Rahm Emanuel visited the Bay Area and Stanford University to talk Chicago tech."They may not know how Chicago has changed in terms of tech in the last few years," Woods said.
Later this year Mayor Emanuel will visit Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, University of Michigan and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ChicagoNEXT also sent Mayor Emanuel and a cadre of Chicago tech leaders down to UIUC as a way to promote ThinkChicago, an annual program for college students around the country to come to Chicago and experience the city's tech scene and culture (complete with tickets to Lollapalooza in the summer and Chicago Ideas Week in the fall).
These visits are a good way to connect with the 'Chicago diaspora'
Over 1,150 student have participated in the program since it started in 2011. This past year 308 students from over 35 institutions nationally participated in ThinkChicago programming. Surveys of ThinkChicago 2016 participants found that the percentage of program alumni who indicated they were likely to very likely to move to Chicago for work post-graduation rose from 53 percent to 87 percent after completing the program, according to World Business Chicago and U of I statistics.
Escario, who also participated in ThinkChicago this past summer, said both experiences were key to his education and personal growth.
"I could not choose between Silicon Valley and Chicago as both have so much...and have proven to be at the same level. Chicago did a great job at that," he said. "I hope that when the moment comes, somebody else will decide for me."
Photo credit: Anthony Jakubiak
