A look at CODE’s evolution over the past two yearsOver the past two years, over 650 students have signed up for the CODE newsletter or come to one of our events. Every week CODE hosts a 30-minute Lightning Talk, where a student shares a demo or project and talks about a piece of code that they are particularly proud of in their codebase. This past year, CODE started experimenting with external Lighting Talks. Colleen Tapan (HBS ‘18) brought in engineers from the IBM Watson team to share their work with the Open Crime Project. She also partnered with the Harvard AR/VR Student Alliance to bring in Richard Dulude (HBS ‘15), who gave a hands-on demo for how to build a VR experience in Unity. These sessions gave students a starting point to launch their own side-projects.
What are CODE members working on outside of the club?Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, recently tweeted: "One reason there are so few really big startups founded by MBAs is that MBAs don't do side projects." At CODE, we live for side projects. In the past one year, multiple CODE members have turned those side projects into startups:
Sam Li (‘17), one of our CODE co-founders, started Zinc Platform, which was selected into the YC W17 class
Natalie Abeysena (HSE ‘16), an early CODE member, founded Quiki, and was also selected into the YC W17 class
Dmitry Zhdankin (‘17) and Armand Mignot (‘17) met at CODE last fall and then co-founded Finfox, a MIT100K Finalist
Andrea Coravos (‘17), Anshul Bhagi (‘17), and Sam Li, three co-founders of CODE, worked with Yazmin Razavi (‘17) and Damola Adamolekun (‘17) to build Ummo, a speech coaching app that was featured on App Store last spring
Nate Fox (‘17) and Nate Maslak (‘17), co-founded HealthWiz, which recently raised their first investment through Rough Draft VenturesNew side projects are spinning up every day, and we have countless additional examples we could share from our members. Our mission at CODE is not to be an incubator or entrepreneurial organization. Harvard prides itself on being one of the best business schools in the world for Entrepreneurship and it has heavily invested behind that mission. The Harvard Innovation Lab, Rock Accelerator, and Entrepreneurship Club are all prominent forces on campus. HBS students are surrounded by senior entrepreneurs, world-class lawyers and are trained to identify good businesses and structure favorable term sheets. However, Harvard has historically underinvested in the engineering skills students need to turn these ideas into products. CODE and the other technologically-oriented clubs are the grassroots, student-led response to fill that gap. We seek to bring the technologically-curious community together to turn ideas into the leading companies of tomorrow. These skills apply to careers beyond entrepreneurship -- technical skillsets are becoming increasingly valuable to all types of organizations, regardless of size or focus. No matter where you plan on heading after school, the job markets are already changing. ECs are increasingly finding themselves in technical interviews. GE CEO Jeff Immelt has made a public announcement that all new hires will learn to code. We believe we are heading at full speed towards a future where nearly all business leaders will need to be technologically literate, and we want to prepare our peers for those experiences.
What academic opportunities exist at HBS to gain technical skills?Today, the academic options HBS students have for technical advancement are both limited and only available to second years. All in all there are fewer than five engineering and data-rigorous courses in the current HBS curriculum. Julia Austin, the CTO of Digital Ocean, teaches PM101/102, where students build products hand-in-hand with an engineering team. Jeffrey Polzier teaches a data science course called People Analytics. David Malan teaches CS50 for MBAs, an over-subscribed Q4 class at the end of EC year, which is a slimmed down version of CS50, the most popular undergraduate course at Harvard College since 2014. CS50 is taught in the fall, and a number of HBS students cross-register into it each year. The HBS Digital Initiative and other faculty within the administration are working to bring more academic options into the curriculum. We believe this will be a great benefit for students professionally as employers demand stronger technical skills. Some of the most obvious opportunities are in the RC year: incorporating digital literacy and coding into TOM and data science and engineering into MKT. We believe another option Harvard should consider would be to allow pre-MBAs and current students to apply their student aid towards coding bootcamps, like the Flatiron School, in the summers before, during, or even after their Harvard programs. Coding bootcamps are eligible for student loans -- and we believe Harvard could be a pioneer by making this an additive part of the HBS curriculum.
I’ve always wanted to become more technical. How can I get involved?First, check out the Tech Starter Kit from the HBS Digital Initiative. In it, you’ll find all the technical clubs, workshops, and groups across all the schools at Harvard University. Sign up for CODE, Tech Club, BAD, Bitcoin Club or AR/VR. We all partner on multiple events, so you’ll likely get a taste of many of them over the course of the year. We also have opportunities for, and encourage, learning at home -- and you can join the CODE GitHub over the summer to set up your computer and try out a few intro to coding challenges. Consider swapping out your internship or delaying your start-date for a coding or data science bootcamp. Nearly everyone we’ve met has said that these programs have been empowering, fun, and changed the way they view the world. It’s never too late to start. With how quickly technology is changing, even the “best” in the world often become beginners again. We know this is only the beginning of the digital era, and we’re here to bolster Harvard as it navigates the next chapter of the journey. But never forget, it is incumbent upon each new generation of students to keep that movement going. See something that’s missing in our community? Speak up and host a workshop or start a club. Think the curriculum should be updated to fill a skill gap? Petition the school. As Darwin would say, “Evolve or perish.” You all have the power to push these critical ideas forward. Use it.
Exhibit: Meet some of our CODE Members and Advocates
Verdell Walker, HBS 2017
Why did you get involved in CODE? For some time, it has been my goal to gain basic coding expertise. I attended bootcamps and workshops but still found coding to be intimidating. The resources out there can be overwhelming. CODE was a great way to learn more about development from my peers at HBS and have a group of people learning alongside me. I am a creator by nature, and I wanted coding to be part of my creative toolkit. I am a writer – I published my first novel in 2013. When I have an idea for a story, I can make my vision come to life with words on a laptop or with pen and paper. I have so many ideas for apps and software that I wish to create, but I was limited by not currently having robust coding skills beyond HTML and very basic CSS. I found it frustrating that I couldn’t bring my vision to life myself and had to rely on others to do so! CODE put me on the path to changing that. What were your favorite tools and resources you used while in school to learn? The weekly CODE bootcamp used CodeAcademy to teach us Python, which I really liked. I also attended bootcamps from General Assembly when they came to campus (front-end and back-end web development). Do you think technical skills will be an important asset to you in the future? Why? I think that coding is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. I plan to work in entertainment and I’m sure that my future roles will require me to delve into using existing and new digital distribution methods to distribute media content. I want to be able to speak with the programmers I’d be working with, and be able to quickly assess what is possible and what is not in terms of development.
Why did you get involved in CODE? For some time, it has been my goal to gain basic coding expertise. I attended bootcamps and workshops but still found coding to be intimidating. The resources out there can be overwhelming. CODE was a great way to learn more about development from my peers at HBS and have a group of people learning alongside me. I am a creator by nature, and I wanted coding to be part of my creative toolkit. I am a writer – I published my first novel in 2013. When I have an idea for a story, I can make my vision come to life with words on a laptop or with pen and paper. I have so many ideas for apps and software that I wish to create, but I was limited by not currently having robust coding skills beyond HTML and very basic CSS. I found it frustrating that I couldn’t bring my vision to life myself and had to rely on others to do so! CODE put me on the path to changing that. What were your favorite tools and resources you used while in school to learn? The weekly CODE bootcamp used CodeAcademy to teach us Python, which I really liked. I also attended bootcamps from General Assembly when they came to campus (front-end and back-end web development). Do you think technical skills will be an important asset to you in the future? Why? I think that coding is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. I plan to work in entertainment and I’m sure that my future roles will require me to delve into using existing and new digital distribution methods to distribute media content. I want to be able to speak with the programmers I’d be working with, and be able to quickly assess what is possible and what is not in terms of development.
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