How Wesleyan’s Counter Culture Came To Rule New York’s Tech Scene

As a Wesleyan graduate of CS, I have to say that this piece amuses me. None of the people mentioned in the article actually are CS majors (there were only 5 of us the year I graduated), but are "McKinsey consultants" and "[guys] where Hollywood didn't really work out for us, but now are trying our luck in Hollywood." And the picture of the urban rooftop party featured in the article vaguely reminds me of the NYC rooftop party at the hedge fund office where I worked for previously staffed with attractive hipster receptionists, HR people and managers who dressed the part and were quite clueless about the technology or the domain area we were involved in - but were very good at making mixed drinks and dj-ing. These guys in essense, are very much part of the "party people" that look and play the part, complete down to the prep school pedigree and the sensibly choosen retro flannel mix-and-match - that a lot of programmers both in the Valley/Alley are looking up to.

There was a phase in my life when I drank the kool-aid, partook in the festivities and read James Joyce and attempted to think deeply about the Hegelian dialectic but then I realized that these "lofty" concerns belied a more pressing issue, how Joyce or that indie band might have impressed that hipster chick that I ran into at the MGMT show last Saturday and had the hots for - because she was French (and therefore social-consensenually hot).

Fast forward to present-times, I work in IT and my co-workers consist of one guy from Belarus and another guy from India both on H1B but both of them could write amazing code and we are three months ahead the schedule in shipping out a informatics platform with about 100+ users. It's not the sexiest work a la "changing the way one shops on the Internet" but we ship, get paid and have free time to pursue our other interests - because impressing programmers/tech bloggers isn't really my concern as you can't get laid anyways by doing it. It took me awhile to love and embrace the atom bomb but I have to be grateful for my alma matter for teaching me unexpectedly to distinguish between what's crap and what's substance. So while I am unfortunately no longer part of the "Wesleyan mafia," I try to keep my head up and am confident that I'll be around when the IT/startup market crashes in the next cycle.

As with the other Wesleyan students in this thread, I find this article pretty bizarre. I'm one of 6 current CS seniors and our "department" (actually part of the Math department) consists of only five professors. Furthermore, there is almost no emphasis on programming in the major; all of the core classes (and most of the electives, which are few and far between) are focused strictly on computer science. While I personally appreciate this rigorous focus on theory as it complements my own practical experience, for most students it means never seeing a real, large programming project or the tools to manage it.

As a result of all this, many Wesleyan CS graduates go to grad school instead of start ups. This isn't helped by the single-minded focus of the career center on careers in finance and consulting, which leads to a complete absence of technical recruiting on campus. I and several other students including @samdk and @rubergly have tried to change this to some degree by offering more outlets for students on campus to program, but it's definitely an uphill battle.

That said, if NY/Boston startups feel like making the commute up to central Connecticut, they'll find many smart students with a strong grounding in computing theory and math. I just wish the school was more interested in making that happen.

Hi folks - director of the Wes Career Center here. Happy to see this article is getting some notice.

On campus recruiting is a game of yield - the companies that come back to campus year after year have multiple positions to fill and consistently get a good turn out from Wes students. Google returns every year because we get a great response from students. Other, less well-known tech firms that have tried haven't gotten a big enough response to keep coming back for on campus recruiting.

BUT - most people will not get a job through on-campus recruiting in the first place. We have lots of resources for folks interested in tech fields, and, as the article underlines, we have a great network of alumni out there that we can help you connect to. Indeed, the whole point to Digital Wesleyan is to create awareness and real networking opportunities for alumni and for students that turn into business opportunities and job opportunities. That's why the career center jumped at the change to work with Jake to get it launched.

Come on down to Butterfield A - happy to work with you!

This is neat. But it also leads me to a tangential question:

Where are the publicly-educated tech moguls?

We continually hear about Stanford, Harvard, and places like Wesleyan. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who came from state universities or other public institutions, as well as those from less wealthy backgrounds. It's time for you guys to speak up and inspire the next generation, for the good of our economy, and for the health of our entrepreneurial ecosystem.

I'm currently a student at Wesleyan, and seeing this article was awfully surprising to me. If we really do rule the tech scene in one of the largest cities in the US, I certainly wouldn't know it from being here. Our CS department is tiny (but excellent) and is focused almost entirely on the science of computing rather than applications of the craft. I've heard of some Wesleyan grads going on to high positions in the tech world but I assumed these were exceptions to the rule.

I came to Wesleyan not because I thought it would have the best programs for what I wanted to study, but because of the student community. I have never seen such a high volume of creative output from any group of people, and it inspires me daily. If there are programmers somewhere on campus that exhibit this level of excellence and inspiration in their work, they've been quiet about it.

Jake, what advice would you have for a current Wesleyan student who wishes to be active in the tech world?

And if you're reading this, other Wesleyan students, can we hang out? I like web development a lot but I'm not smart enough to do it all by myself. Let's build stuff!

[Disclosure: I went to wes and didn't major in CS (though wish I had taken more classes in it)]

I think the main point from this article is that the type of thought wesleyan teaches has proven itself well-suited to the creative, innovative thinking valued in the tech and startups especially. While this isn't necessarily programming focused, there are other roles in the industry Wesleyan is showing it has done really well in.

Also, while more grads move to NYC than anywhere else, I will say there's plenty of wesleyan tech talent out here in the bay area (CEO of rdio, a bunch of folks at google, and startups).

The school would definitely be well served by beefing up it's CS department and trying to attract more talent. With a solid programming community on campus, I bet we'd see some awesome projects emerge especially as tech mixes more with the strong arts and music scenes.

Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks as mentioned in the article. http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf