ℹ️ About
We believe Columbia can be among the best universities for impact in tech. We can start by building leadership among our liberal arts and Ivy League peers—and becoming the talent hub for New York tech.
Our organizing team is pledging $100,000+ over the next 10 years to fund student- and alumni-led initiatives advancing our Columbia community in technology.
✅ Guidelines
We are focused on backing efforts led by students, alumni, and their respective organizations.
These funds can be provided as donations to a non-profit entity, or arranged as in-kind contributions. We want it to be simple to pay for purchases necessary for your initiative to be successful.
💭 Requests
First and foremost, we want to support ideas raised by students and alumni. That said, since we’ve worked in this field for a while, there are always areas we’re seeing as opportunities and wished leaders might step up to take ownership:
Career Placement: ADI and CCE have long held successful technology career fairs. Could we do more to enable internship and full-time job placement, such as by pre-screening candidates for employers, or offering additional training to students and alumni? By comparison, Stanford has the Mayfield Fellowship, and Berkeley has Accel Scholars.
Peer & Senior Mentorship: Tech is often a confusing and non-linear career path to navigate, where any single person might join large companies, young startups, start their own businesses and/or engage in further academic study and research. One of the ways to make that journey less opaque would be more fellowship or peer mentorship programs.
Value-Add Syndicate: For the most capable founders in our community, the challenge isn’t meeting investors, but knowing what to expect, and who to trust. A group of experienced alumni founders and venture investors, working with students, could help the next generation navigate this labyrinth.
Alumni Recognition: The University has several ways of highlighting and recognizing successful alumni, which can help reinforce their career momentum and also inspire others to follow in their footsteps. Can we do more to plug alumni in technology into University award programs (Lions Pride), as well as media properties (Columbia magazine)?
Tech Beyond Software: Technology has become synonymous with computer science and “software”, but there are exciting opportunities and groups focused on space, computational biology, neurotech, chemicals and materials, among other fields. What can we do to broaden our Columbia in Tech community and include non-software members?
Academia & Industry: In the Bay Area, the technology industry is well-networked with academia, creating new opportunities for collaboration and learning. Some of the most successful technology companies have emerged from leading labs at Berkeley and Stanford, such as Databricks. We have some examples of our own (Nanotronics), but can we do more to connect interested faculty and graduate students with mature and emerging technology companies working in similar fields?
📧 Next Steps
We would love to hear about your efforts. Please email us and include:
Any relevant background on you or your organization
The event or initiative you are organizing
An estimate of the overall cost you would like us to cover
✳️ Notes
We will not be able to fund every initiative, but we hope to be a resource regardless.
To some extent, we will preference opportunities with a path to long-term sustainability—for example, a program that requires $5-15K over a few years before shifting to user fees, corporate sponsors, or other funding models.
