Apr 25, 2011
St. James kids get glimpse of NYC tech startup
EllenMarie Yassopoulos remembers grade school and wanting to grow up to be either a secretary or a nurse while her male classmates aspired to be lawyers and doctors because “those were the options then.” But as she watched her son Christopher, 13, talk shop with computer programmers at technology start-up Yodle during a one-day internship last week, she realized those days are gone. “It’s a whole new world, it’s amazing,” said the Port Jefferson mother who chaperoned her son and his classmates on the trip. “And there will be new jobs 10 years from now that no one had ever thought of.”
Christopher Yassopoulos was one of seven students from the Saints Philip and James School, in St. James, to take part in a “microinternship” in New York City on Thursday. The program, organized by technology teacher George Haines, teaches seventh and eighth graders about new technology. Haines said the internship breaks down the walls of the classroom and shows the students the real-world application of technology. “What’s happening in New York right now with the start-up scene, it’s like nothing that I’ve seen in my life,” he said. “It’s just a bubbling phenomenon of people coming up with ideas. It would be a shame not to get the kids involved.”
At Yodle, an online advertising company, the students spent about 30 minutes with an employee in each department, watching what they do and having the chance to ask questions, said Kara Silverman, a company spokeswoman. They also got the chance to question company executives about how they started the business. Silverman said the Yodle employees were impressed with the students’ questions, their knowledge of the company and the tools it uses. She said the students knew the basic vernacular, having already learned about things like online advertising and search engine optimization in class. She said. “They knew more about what we did than some of our clients.”
Haines, who taught physical education at the St. James school before switching to technology three years ago, teaches the students about things like computer programming, user experience and social media, and how those become tools for a business. He also set them up with a Twitter account and has the students tweet about their experiences as microinterns. He took students to New York City for microinternships on two occasions during school vacations this year, once in February at the company TechStars, and to Yodle on Thursday. Steven DeVito, 13, of Centereach participated in both microinternships. DeVito, who said he wants to one day start a business, said he felt confident talking to professionals about the technology they use and even shared some of his own knowledge with the people at Yodle.
“I was able to tell them something about fixing viruses because I had some knowledge of that,” he said. Yassopoulos, who called the program “wonderful,” and applauded Haines for pushing the envelope, said the students walked away from the internship with motivation for the future. “They saw real people in real situations, people really trying very hard to start up a company,” she said. “A lot of kids walked away saying, ‘I want to do that one day.’”
Photo caption: Yodle co-founder Ben Rubenstein sits with a group of seventh- and eighth-graders from the Saints Philip and James School in St. James and their teacher George Haines. (April 21, 2011)
Published In: Newsday
