Namita Bhasin

Daniel Brusilovsky, renowned teen entrepreneur, wrote a post debating whether or not to go to college. As I tend to do, I got a little emotional in my response, but I find the subject important enough to repost it here.

Daniel,

I really admire what you’ve accomplished already – more than I have at 22 – but I really think you’re young and inexperienced enough that college may have something to teach you.

For you, college wouldn’t be about starting you on your career path. It would be more about finding people (friends, partners, significant others – especially valuable since there’s a relatively limited selection of people your age in your current circles) and expanding your knowledge of other things. Most entrepreneurs ignore me when I say this, but there is (at least a little) more to life than your startup. There is more to learn and be interested in than just what Silicon Valley and your current area of knowledge have to offer. It’s too early to isolate yourself from other opportunities.

Personally, I’m deeply involved in SV too, but I majored in Political Economy and Linguistics, two things that made little practical sense but were incredibly valuable for my own interest and enrichment. Academics aside, I lived on my own, got a taste of a different place and lifestyle, met different kinds of people, grew up, and had a little bit of fun. Four years of college was anything but a waste of time.

I really hope you decide to go to college. Continue what you’re doing by all means – being in school doesn’t mean you have to stop working – but I promise it’s worth going.

I ditched (one) class Friday afternoon to go judge the Global Social Venture Competition. Someone had reached out to ST@B to see if anyone wanted to be a student judge for the Berkeley applications, so I signed up. After all, I’m interested in how ventures’ intentions can actually be socially beneficial. I didn’t know anything about it prior to - or after - volunteering, but I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some ‘formal’ experience/training interacting with business plans.

I’ve had plenty of exposure to business plans via classes, internships, and talking shop with my dad, but I have this weird habit of seeking further instruction on certain topics whether I think I need it or not (why I keep going to stuff to “learn about social media,” for example). Story of my life, actually. I know a lot of stuff, but I’ve never gotten any kind of structured lessons on much of it, so I don’t know if I’m doing it right/well/properly. Perhaps that’s what business school is for, but that remains to be seen. I’ll let you know in a few years if I decide to go.

So I show up and walk into a room full of MBA students. Oops… didn’t get the memo on that one. Luckily someone asks me if I’m in one of his classes, so I suppose I didn’t appear too out of place. Actually, a few people at the She’s Geeky Unconference also assumed I was a grad student; I wonder what makes people think that. Anyway, instead of swooshing right over my head, the task at hand was totally manageable.

I’m rambling as usual, so here’s my point: It turns out I am well able/qualified to read and evaluate executive summaries that had taken MBA students presumably months of research and planning and writing to formulate. Yay for me, right? The sad part is, some of them were awful (I’m not an MBA so I don’t have to be politically correct!). I encountered badly written plans, full of typos and illogical sentence structure, and one that could have been amazing - if the core idea made any sense at all. Still another looked like the product of an hour of brainstorming over coffee with zero research backing it up (at least not in the summary). There are real judges that will decide which plans continue in the competition, but since they asked for my input, I strongly feel that some of those should not.

Does this mean I’m The Shit when it comes to business plans? Hah. I think it suggests that I can trust a lot of what I know even if it isn’t formally delivered information. It may also mean that I can continue learning for my career in the way that I have been so far - nonacademically and sometimes haphazardly. I’m smart enough to discern what’s important. Indicator: when people ask what I’m majoring in (Linguistics, International Political Economy) and what kind of work I’m looking to do after grad (the non-technical side of the tech industry), they no longer ask what the relationship that can possibly be. I just talk about what I’ve done outside and around school, and they’re satisfied.

Well, at least it looks like I know what I’m doing.

(okay, so this isn’t quite live. It was messy and contained too much stuff I didn’t want to publish so I edited very very slightly before releasing. *insert props for Wordpress iPhone app here* *also insert plea for netbook*)

Session 1: Being a woman entrepreneur

I think I’m fortunate to be a female in a ridiculously male-dominated industry. I never really realized that until the current session. I don’t encounter “boys’ club” discrimination like many of these women say they do. I don’t think people see me as bitchy, or inferior, or as the secretary. I think an advantage of how people see you is, well, that they see you. And then you gauge how to deal with them accordingly - impression management was a big point here.

check out: Springboardenterprises.org

Importance of business plan - half say very, half say eh. I say very. Will explain why in a GSVC post.

Session 2: Social media beyond Twitter

I’m hoping this session will help me figure out how to get my get-people-online deal going.

What’s your aim? Personal brand, community management, customer acquisition, sales? Be where your audience as competitors are (duh).

Note to self: check out Pipl - the ‘creepy’ way to stalk people on the internet

Private vs. public personas: should they be separate? People that think so seem to generally be concerned about security and conservative audiences. I said no and I think the gap fell largely around generational lines.

Check out radian6.

Adobe and social media: press releases on Twitter, blog posts, facebook… Sounds like that’s all. Okay.

Importance of consistent branding? Maybe not so much.

Social media is a channel for marketing, PR, engineering, customer support, etc. (no way)

Finally, something not-Twitter: RSS to collect information. (no WAY!)

Basically, nothing I didn’t already know or haven’t yet beaten to death here. I was intrigued by the “beyond Twitter” part of the title. Oh well.

Session 3: Voiding your warranty

I came here to see what other toys I could screw around with besides my jailbreak-able iPhone. They showed us a lot of snazzy hacked electronics, and I saw E-Ink for real for the first time since I heard about it ~3yrs ago! The women running this session were REAL hardcore geeks and they were awesome.

Adafruit.com. Wiihomebrew.com. Xoxbox.

Session 4: Finding a job in this economy

I won’t include the usual suggestions because everyone knows them already, or should. Experience, networking, job boards, etc. You know the drill.

check out Sdforum.org

Volunteer to get time away and do good things and get glowing recommendations.

PARS: problem assessment result solution

Sunnyvale EDD one stop career counseling (free!) novaworks.org

Simplyhired.com, Indeed.com, Startuply.com, Cupertino rotary club

New rounds of funding have to be publicly announced, look for places that info might be

People here are uncomfortable asking for help. I don’t think I am, and I think that’s a good thing.

Sometimes a person with less than enough experience is better hire because they are trainable and not set in their ways.

Ebawis.org (women in science)

Session 5: Semantic web

I was super excited about this. Soo ready to hammer out a solid definition for what this really means.

First things first, apparently web 2.0 is “silly.” I disagree. We won’t get into that.

Does semantic web rely on tags? It shouldn’t because people suck at tagging. Myself included; it’s a wonder anyone ever finds my blog.

Is it for marketing? For ad suggesting? Cultural context is important.

Important info sources: APIs and geotagging, IMDB, Yelp, Amazon (opened their database).

Natural language is important because not all web content is in databases.

See ‘linking open data,’ Freebase

Conversation has been on the verge of technical linguistic topics many times, but so far I’m the only one that’s said anything close to that effect.

Web grows decentralized and organically. Will that die with the semantic web? Doubt it. Moving on…

Open social graph (google), Alex Iskold (adaptive blue)

I introduced this crowd to Searchme and Cuil. Someone else just brought up Twine - oops, I think I played around with it in its early days then forgot about it. I also mentioned my disappointment with Powerset.

There are lots of librarians here.

Check out Aurora browser

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Those are my random cursory observations from today; full detailed notes from all sessions on both days will be available on a wiki at shesgeeky.org.

Today I signed up for Path101, a career guidance site currently in alpha. I forget how I heard about it - probably Twitter, because that’s how I get most of my information these days. Anyway, I decided to sign up because I (a) like to play with new toys and (b) am trying to get a career started here, and any advice is welcome.

They offer a ‘personality test’ that gauges your traits and skills and presents you with career options accordingly. I have my doubts about the test, since all questions are vague and answered by a sliding scale or ranking options, but it’s a good start and leads to some degree of introspection if nothing else. There’s also some form of resume analysis, where you upload your resume (didn’t work) or link them to your LinkedIn; I’ve given them the latter but haven’t done anything with it yet. Lastly, I checked out the questions section and answered a few. It appears that more features - additional quizzes and such - are in the works.

The site is a good idea and has the potential to turn into a valuabe resource, especially with so many people now out of work (or about to be) and average-career-switches-per-American on the rise. They don’t specialize in any particular field, which could be a good or a bad thing, I haven’t decided. It’ll either give them a foot in the door in a variety of industries, or cause them to miss out on offering services that could make them indispensable in a particular field. Maybe they could increase traffic via an application on LinkedIn, or maybe they’d be better off doing that instead of a destination site. I suppose it’s too early to tell. I definitely support their mission, though, so I’ll be checking in periodically and playing around some more