Call For Mentors

As I discussed in my last blog post, I recently joined Pursuit.org as their Director AI Product Engineering. And now I have a request:

If you have the capacity to mentor a student at Pursuit for just one hour per week over 15 weeks (virtually or in NYC), please reach out to me about volunteering. (Email, Bluesky, Mastodon, or find me somewhere on the internet.) Reach out and let me know even if you're not ready to make this commitment today, but think you may have more time in the future.

Mentoring isn't complicated or hard, but it goes a very long way: You'll share your experience, insights, and advice across career and professional development. Your mentorship doesn't just have to be about tech, and isn't limited solely to people in tech. This is a low-touch way to help, you just be you and help someone become better — no strings attached and no complexity.

I will guide you through the process if you need, answer any questions you have, and do whatever it takes to support you. I just want good people to help improve the lives of good people who are trying to build a better life.

I'll quote liberally from my previous blog post to provide some background for why I think you'd enjoy volunteering at Pursuit, with some new commentary as to why it's such an interesting and meaningful opportunity.

Pursuit at its core is a job readiness program, one that operates rather uniquely. You can read more about it on their website, but the gist is that for over a decade they've taken cohorts of people who make an average of $18,000 a year and given them a free 9-12 month training program. Pursuit helps students (now known as builders) develop in-demand skills and pairs them with a job placement team. Over the years they've had an 85$94,000 a year. The numbers fluctuate per cohort and the curriculum always changes, but as you can imagine, these results are truly life-changing.

The people who run Pursuit are dedicated, but it's the builders that make Pursuit what it is. Many work eight-hour shifts as bartenders, teachers, or Uber drivers, and still come to class five days a week for 4-8 hours a day. When they're done they go home, continue working on their assignments, get as much sleep as they can, and do it all over again the next day.

A big reason that Pursuit is as successful as it is comes down to the volunteers who help us succeed. We're always looking for help from people who have industry experience and are willing to share their knowledge. This allows us to open doors to people who do not have the access we are so lucky to have, and through that we make the industry around us better.

But it's not just a nice thing to do, it's an incredibly fulfilling experience.

It's been over 11 years since I started volunteering at Pursuit. I helped interview and select people for their very first cohort. I've mentored individuals and became close friends with some. I've attended Demo Days, given talks, and when I worked at Twitter I would bring engineers by so students could benefit from my industry access. Pursuit has always shown that it doesn't matter how much you have, but what you have to give.

I've spent countless hours at Pursuit, but last year I was there every week volunteering with their inaugural AI-native pilot. I grew incredibly close to the people taking on this challenge. With the tech industry in such upheaval, the promise of employment on the other side was more uncertain. And yet people believed that if they bet on themselves it would all work out, so I was happy to do what I could to improve the odds. I loved every minute of it.

When I was done volunteering I'd come home to my wife Colleen and share every little detail from class. In her words, I was always beaming, with the biggest smile on my face. One night I took her to Demo Day, where the builders were presenting the projects they'd been working on for two months.

Making the world a better place isn't just about the world, it's about you. The goal may be to live in a better world, but when you help someone, you're helping yourself too. We have ambitious goals at Pursuit, and for over a decade we've been delivering on them. Our next steps involve scaling Pursuit's curriculum up to reach all New Yorkers, but the work starts one person at a time. I'd love for that person to be you, so please do reach out.

Email, Bluesky, Mastodon, or find me somewhere on the internet.