What is your university doing to foster entrepreneurship? For most people, academia is about research. Sometimes it seems like industry only cares about academia when they need to profit from bleeding edge research and academics care about industry only when they need funding. I’m proud to say that that’s not the whole story at Berkeley.
I’m at the end of my third semester as head TA of Berkeley’s Ruby on Rails class (currently CS 194, formerly CS 198). I’ve been with it since the inaugural class in Spring 2007. The class has evolved from being loosely organized, pass or fail, and taught in the main lobby of the RAD Lab (who sponsors it) to this semester’s full fledged, letter graded, “Software as a Service” powerhouse with almost 50 students enrolled. What hasn’t changed is the end result of every term: groups of students building great web apps with Ruby on Rails. In my opinion, it’s the core of the class and why I’ve stayed involved for so long. Fall 2008 was no different; we had some great apps!
Overall, it’s great to be involved in a class that:
Gives Students Options
Our students really get to own their projects by deciding what to work on, with whom, and how to actually go about implementing their ideas. This is in contrast to a large number of more typical computer science classes where you’re given lots of code, told what to do and how to do it, and don’t always work in groups. In the end, people who take our class often end up building things that transcend the semester.
Gets People Hired
Not only have we taught agile methodologies, big ideas like metaprogramming, and scalability in the cloud, but we’ve also given students skills that make them immediately hire-able. Timothy Yung interned at Yahoo, Jerry Cheung went on to Coupa Software, Hubert Wong and Jimmy Nguyen were recruited into the RAD Lab, and I myself spent an excellent summer at Venrock.
Encourages Entrepreneurship
There are few classes outside of the Haas School of Business that let students get away with dreaming the startup dream. We on the other hand, treat projects like micro startups – you get what you put in. From the very semester it was offered, building projects for our class has been described as doing a quick startup.
For a full listing of this semester’s projects check out the pbwiki we used for project brainstorming and keeping track of who’s up to what. There’s also a live blog of the demo day presentations.
Who’s enabled all this?
Our fantastic professors:
Armando Fox
Will Sobel
David Patterson
along with current and former TA’s:
Arthur Klepchukov (me)
Hubert Wong
Jimmy Nguyen
Alex Bain
Thanks for another great semester everybody!
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