My hackNY Adventure
Hi there, I'm Allison, a rising Senior at University of Texas at Dallas, and I want to share my summer 2024 with HackNY!
Going into the program, I was unsure about if I should accept my position in the fellowship. The location (downtown Brooklyn) was a 30 minute commute to my internship, and it was pretty expensive for sharing a room with someone else ($2000 a month). However, I reasoned that money would come back and commute time was manageable for the chance to possibly meet lifelong friends and get valuable connections. (Spoiler: 30 minutes is not bad at all for NYC)
Looking back now, I don't regret my decision at all. The people I met in the program were so genuinely curious and passionate about learning, and surprisingly social for it being a tech-y group of people. We would spend many nights just hanging out in someone’s room, talking and learning more about each other’s life experiences and interests. I am introverted, but coming back after work to go to an event or hang out with my roommates was never tiring for me because I got to see my friends everyday. Everyone I met outside of my current cohort was also super cool, and it was super easy setting up coffee chats with them. HackNY is much more than just a tech organization where people get together and code. Most of my takeaways from events and coffee chats were about how I wanted to live my life, and how my career could impact that. It was cool to hear about transit tech, but even more inspiring to hear about how you can apply technology to any passion you have, even from your childhood.
Summer Highlights
I also wanted to share some of my favorite memories from the Summer, in no particular order.
My roommates and I would stay up late at night just doing random things, from talking about death to learning a tiktok dance (very badly). We would also occasionally wake up at 6-7am and go to a ClassPass class, where we would cycle phone numbers for a free trial because it’s crazy expensive. I would always look forward to coming back and just sitting in the living room with my roommates, laughing about stupid stuff and occasionally locking in (I did half a leetcode total over the Summer).
I saw Wicked with my roommates!
Our house organized Luna Park at Coney Island for our weekend outing.
We went hiking at Breakneck Ridge! It was honestly so fun and I don’t even really enjoy hiking that much.
I got to visit so many offices over the Summer from the fellowship events and from the mentors/fellows taking us in! My favorite memory is 4 of us skipping work to get a multi-course French meal at the Google office, thanks to our lovely mentor Sophia.
Quick shoutout: Sophia was the greatest mentor ever, and she gave such good life and career advice to me. Beyond that, she is such a positive soul and we had such good talks about non-serious things from dating advice to religion to food!
And so much more that I can’t fit here!
Overall, I would recommend the program to people who are looking to make friends and want to explore the world of tech outside of traditional "FAANG Quant prestige" tech. You are not going to enjoy every talk, or every weekend outing, or love every fellow in your cohort, but if you have a genuine passion for experiencing new things and meeting people then I know you will have as great of a time as I did.
If you want to see more, I made a video recap.
