Week 0: Deus Ex Machina

Time: 01/08-01/15, 3 hours

Topics: Tech Startups and Entrepreneurship, The Pros and Cons of a Remote Internship.

Tools: N/A

Summary:

‍In January, a few days before flying back to Chicago, I was home in San Francisco without an internship for my semester in Woodlawn. I had sent in dozens of applications months in advance and at this point had gotten rejected from a few places. The last few days of my winter break were spent anxiously watching my inbox, scrappily applying last minute for any software dev. internships I could find on Indeed and praying. My parents were as concerned as I was about all this and their well-intended advice was reminding me of my inadequacy. Several doubts began to surface. Had I made a mistake seeking an internship in software development and web design? Should I have applied to the list of organizations that needed interns and had a prior relationship with Wheaton College in the Woodlawn area? Had the decision to do Wheaton in Chicago altogether been made on a whim? Would it not be simpler to give up on an Urban Studies minor and return to Wheaton next year to an established community, my campus jobs, and a wonderful apartment and roommate in College Ave?

I remember checking my email for the 500th time on January 8th, 2 days before leaving home, and finding an email from someone named Peter MacDonald. Its subject read—“Techstars Cohort Company Internship Opportunity?”. I scraped my memory for the application I had submitted to a Techstars cohort company but nothing came to mind. In fact, I had never heard of Techstars and hadn’t even been looking for internships with startups in the first place. I read the email. I read it again. Peter was reaching out to find out if I would be interested in an internship with his company, Wunderite, a startup building next-gen tech for insurance agents, that Spring.

A few awkward zoom calls later, I agreed to intern with Wunderite and was excited to hit the road running after the WIC cohort's week in LA.

A journal entry from Jan 10th describes how I felt my first night in Woodlawn.

"Arriving at Woodlawn. distressed, fragile, and wary of inhabiting such an unwelcoming space. Feeling terribly alone and second-guessing everything."

Although I may have been feeling anxious about my new surroundings, looking back, I am so grateful for the internship with Wunderite and for Peter for reaching out and asking if I would be interested in working with Wunderite that spring. That was something solid I could mentally rely on for my semester in Chicago in an ocean of unknowns. 

The Pros and Cons of a Remote Internship: During this week I had the first of many zoom calls with Peter and Joe. It took some getting used to. Something great about our first few calls was how quickly Peter, Joe, and I were able to set up calls to discuss the possibility of an internship. Meeting people for the first time over a video call is not ideal. It’s harder to become comfortable talking to them, it feels tacky, and little technical issues seem clumsy and unnatural.

Tech Startups and Entrepreneurship: I was especially excited to work with Wunderite because two summers ago Wheaton sent me to LA for Praxis Labs (A friend and I won Wheaton's Pitch competition Freshman year). At Praxis I learned what it meant for entrepreneurship to be redemptive. More on this here but from the first interactions with Peter and Joe I could tell they were really trying to make an empathetic and helpful contribution to people’s lives. Their startup is doing redemptive work in the insurance industry.