Day 0
Overview
Onboarding is tough! We partner with companies and students to bridge the Academic-Professional Gap by leading a week-long boot camp that emulates a work environment to teach essential professional and technical skills.
Key Takeaways:
- My homie Quinn and I noticed that there’s a gap between what CS students learn in the classroom and what employers expect professionally and technically of interns.. and we tried to do something about it!
- From personal experience, we often felt like we wasted so much time being onboarded and wish we could’ve hit the ground running. Architecting this Bootcamp prepared us to hit the ground running with our own remote jobs.
- Soft skills are hard to learn from reading a self-help book or blog post and must be practiced.
- Due to corona, we weren’t able to run the week-long boot camp at the end of the semester. However, in a world where new employees and interns are being onboarded virtually, might there be an even bigger need for something like this?
Motivation:
There’s a gap between what CS students learn in the classroom and what employers expect professionally and technically of interns. Specifically, we noticed a professional/academic divide in technical know-how, use of tools, as well as soft skills.
The gap in the TECHNICAL KNOW-HOW between the classroom and industry
… and there’s no piazza in the workplace :(
The gap in the familiarity of TOOLS between the classroom and industry
sorry … pushing to the company repo? I just googled “repo” and am more confused🤷♀️ 😐 … I thought I worked in tech, not finance
The gap in SOFT SKILLS between the classroom and industry
Interns are similarly expected to master a professional skill set they have had few opportunities (if any) to practice and refine.
Who do I email versus DM on Slack? What can I wear to work? How do I ask a senior employee to a coffee chat … without making it weird?
We’ve been there and know the anxieties and concerns around onboarding toooooo well. Intern pain points can be broken down into 3 big things:
But don’t take our word for it… research agrees!
There’s a real cost to companies
Proposal
Target Personas: Who are we building this for?
All technical interns, but especially underrepresented groups, will benefit
How does Day 0 work?
We bridge the gap between academia and industry by:
- Inserting ourselves between the gap between the end of school year + start of summer
- Effortlessly integrating into current recruiting and onboarding systems
- Hosting Boot camps on college campuses
The Day 0 Philosophy
How do we make our lessons stick?
Our Curriculum
From our experience interning at tech companies, we flagged four main topics
Technical Education: Example topics
A Day in the Life
Here’s an example schedule of a day in the life of one our bootcamp participants
Business ~Stuffffff~
Why we were convinced this approach works? Proven Model, Unique Positioning
So what’s our value proposition?
Is it crazy to think that companies pay us to improve intern outcomes?
We had big plans! And we believed there was a huge market opportunity to grow this. We estimated that summer expenditures for an engineering intern at major tech companies would be $35,000+.
I know what you’re thinking — aren’t people doing this already? Thanks for that seamless transition — let’s talk competition
Competitive Moat
What do we understand about the space that other organizations just don’t get?
OK Yush, we believe you! But who else is even out there?
Competitive Landscape
How do we compare to Competitors + Current Alternatives?
Let us know if we missed anyone … or if a new played popped up in the space between us proposing Day 0 and now!
Next Steps
We had a three-pronged marketing approach
Our big goal was to bring education to the Software world ….
By capturing the recruitment market in the next 5 years
Blockers
- A week-long in-person Bootcamp is inherently unscalable (and trust me — we really thought through alternatives. But hey — if you’re convinced there’s a way to scale this and retain it’s core value, let us know!)
- We had planned to run a pilot with the Princeton Women in CS during “dead week” (the period after finals and before internships start) but due to COVID-19 were unable to hold this in person. As we described above, Quinn and I were pretty convinced that a huge part of the value proposition hinged on this being in person, therefore we didn’t continue this virtually.
- However, now that we have both experienced virtual onboarding and becoming more familiar with WFH, we considered doing this virtually. The big blocker there is what does the future of internships look like? Will tech companies rush to bring interns back in person? Will most interns opt to work remotely and spend the summers with their school friends instead? Since it’s hard to predict the future of work for interns, a very seasonal group, we decided to pause this project.
Had a TON of fun ideating with and pitching this with Quinn Donohue :) Also big shoutout to Rohan Shah and Niko Fotolopous for their feedback during the early stages of this!
