On September 27th from 6:30-8pm, the SCET Student Association invited Berkeley’s entire startup community to their first meeting. The SCETSA is dedicated to connecting Berkeley’s entrepreneurship ecosystem: students, campus organizations, and external partners. A problem many students noticed was a disjointed startup community. In Berkeley alone there are countless innovation organizations such as House and Free Ventures. SCETSA hopes to invite all of these organizations and students to create a tight-knit community, making it easier to get involved and learn about all opportunities in the innovation space. Throughout the semester they plan to host meetings, have Ideation Sessions, Group Think, Hack Sessions, Customer Testing Sprints, and networking events with not only Berkeley students but also leaders in the innovation environment.
This week, one of the speakers was Scott Mauvais, Microsoft’s Director of Technology and Civic Innovation, who spoke about Microsoft’s Fellowship Program. Scott, who has been working at Microsoft for 16 years, discussed Microsoft’s goal of impacting the quality of life through technology. The fellowship program is specifically looking for people who have a background in Computer Science or Data Analytics and are interested in urban areas and cities.
Garrett Brinker and Luke Kim from City Innovate Foundation also discussed opportunities for graduating seniors and spoke about City Innovate Foundation’s mission to solve urban problems using open innovation and public-private partnerships. The San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, City Innovate Foundation, and the General Services Administration came together to form Superpublic, a civic innovation lab that’s creating and facilitating a space for tackling urban challenges using cross-sector collaboration and empirical data-driven research. Superpublic is run by the City Innovate Foundation. Garrett Brinker stated, “We’re creating a new model for urban innovation by building public private partnerships, opening up data, and creating policy initiatives to help cities tackle urban challenges.” This year, they are launching their first round of pilot projects with 33 cities, tackling urban mobility, specifically how open backend integration will prove the capacity of a city to move around people and things. Each core Collider team will be made up of representatives from cities, corporations and academia. City Innovate Foundation is looking for Cal students to be part of a support team to manage this project in various positions such as Research and Data Collection Associates, Test Design Analysts, Project Management Assistants, Program Associates, and much more.
Applications are available at:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKqooiMOa_hJ5WZomvxkU45lvrMxcWjcF8vc2mvCOG8Iu4EQ/viewform
Luke Kim, recent Cal Alum and Manager at City Innovate, stated, “Having been trained in the Berkeley Method, I can’t attribute all my successes to myself. It’s important to give back and pay forward, and that’s the only way we can cultivate a genuine and collaborative ecosystem on campus.” SCETSA is hoping to create this collaborative ecosystem on campus and is looking for more students to get involved. Look out for more events held by SCETSA and ways you can participate!