A little bit about myself, I was born and raised in the beautiful city of Hialeah, FL and I am now residing in Tallahassee to pursue my college career. As a first generation college student there are many challenges that one may face. However, as I entered Florida State University through the CARE program everything seemed to fall right into place. As I am approaching my third year as a FSU student, I have realized that my career passion/goal is to become a Cybersecurity Specialist or Intelligence Analyst for either the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or the FBI. Luckily, with the help of CARE I found out about FSU Tech Fellows and I am now interning for StarterStudio! As a rising junior majoring in Criminology with a minor in Information Technology, you can imagine interning with a business incubator such as StarterStudio was shocking to many of my criminology peers. My internship with StarterStudio and my research project will allow me the opportunity to examine the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of startups and small businesses that are tech-based.
With my second week coming to an end, I realized how much more time and work I was dedicating towards my daily tasks in comparison to my first week. I find it very surprising how even during a time of uncertainty StarterStudio continues to do what they do best: provide educational programming, include industry-specific or startup-specific mentoring, support their founders, and strengthening the startup ecosystem. Furthermore, I have become very familiar with managing my work through the collaboration platform that combines workplace chats, video calls, file storage, and project plans known as Microsoft Teams.
One of my biggest ongoing project consists of alumni engagement. I have been creating numerous ideas on how to do so. For starters, one of the tasks I have been working on has been coming up with blog post and programming ideas that will be interesting for our founders to take part in. Therefore, I have been doing lots of research on how other notable incubators effectively engage alumni through programming virtual events and blog posts. Additionally, this past week I have been heavily involved in StarterStudio’s Founders Forum via LinkedIn. This page will not only serve as a way to build a stronger alumni community but a way to inform alumni of upcoming events that can serve as an aid during these moments of uncertainty.
Finally, my last task of this past week consisted of creating a set of interview questions for upcoming interviews I will be conducting with my colleague Alexander Blanchette. These set of interviews will be with StarterStudio’s newest seed accelerator companies to engage and highlight each of their unique abilities and services. The questions will serve as a guide throughout the interview but are not limited to those questions. This will be an ongoing task we plan to continue with our Idea Stage accelerators, Build Stage accelerators, and founders. This blog post’s image is a screenshot of how the Program department for StarterStudio has decided to keep our ongoing tasks monitored and organized. As you can see, for each task you can upload working documents to share, mark completed, mark in process, and add comments if necessary.
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