It was just under three weeks ago that Brown University told students it was shifting gears: In response to the spread of the novel coronavirus, undergraduate students were to move out by March 22 and finish the semester online, from their homes or elsewhere.
Brown made its announcement just two days after Harvard University, 40 miles to the north, had startled the academic world by asking students not to return after spring break. So Chuck Isgar, a junior majoring in business economics and co-president of the Brown University Entrepreneurship Program, was already making preparations with the expectation that his school would do the same.
"In the dining hall, I was asking students, 'How would things be at home for you?'" Isgar told Rhode Island Inno. "It's a real transition to go home compared to being on a college campus. Something I kept hearing, over and over, was, 'I'm going to have so much extra time, and I don't know what I'm going to do with it.'"
Meanwhile, in the startup world, Isgar knew that companies were looking for extra help. What if he could match up startups with candidates for remote internships?
Isgar enlisted the help of two of his classmates, Megan Kasselberg and David Lu. (Lu is also the co-founder of H2OK Innovations, a startup using AI and data analytics to empower communities with cost-saving information for clean drinking water.) Together, the three of them co-founded what is now Intern From Home, a job board where startups can post remote internship roles and students can apply in turn.
The Intern From Home team, now a group of six Brown students, distributes the listings through an email newsletter that goes out every 48 to 72 hours. Today, the newsletter has nearly 1,000 subscribers. Isgar said he wrote the copy for the first edition of the newsletter on his flight from the East Coast back to Arizona, where his family is.
"It's exciting to think through who we're trying to help right now," Isgar said. "There's a lot of people around the world, from doctors and nurses to everyone else, trying to help. What we're doing is nowhere near what doctors and nurses are doing, but we want to help students. They're getting to be exposed to different startups through our newsletter and our website."
So far, Isgar said, about 40 different companies have posted listings on Intern From Home. They run the gamut: AI startups, strategy consulting firms, digital health platforms and more are all looking for candidates. Isgar said he isn't sure how many placements have been made through Intern From Home, given how recently the site launched, but there are a number of companies currently bringing new interns onto their team.
Intern From Home's launch comes at a time when major tech companies are canceling their prestigious summer internship programs. Glassdoor, StubHub, Funding Circle, Yelp and Checkr have all canceled their programs due to coronavirus, TechCrunch reported last week. Separately, two Arizona State University computer science students have put together a crowdsourced website called, rather bluntly, "Is My Internship Cancelled?"
Isgar thinks those cancellations have helped drive interest in his team's product.
"It’s interesting to see how quickly this spread across the country," Isgar said. "We have roots in the northeast, and very, very quickly after getting the word shared, we started to see students from schools all over the country. It was exciting to see that we have such diversity."
Intern From Home's next steps are to get more companies to list remote internships on the platform as well as grow a candidate pool through the newsletter. The team has reached out to incubator programs, including at Brown and Harvard, along with venture capital firms with the goal of getting their portfolio companies to post listings.
Of course, Isgar and his team are all students themselves—and they're finding themselves in the midst of a "juggling act" between remote classes and running the site, Isgar said.
"Our team works so well together. I’m really thrilled and fortunate to get to work with such amazing people," Isgar said. "This whole thing comes out of a bias for taking action. A lot of this is entrenched into myself and my co-founders. It's what we've learned at Brown."
