It was an unusu­ally cold and dark morn­ing; although that was prob­a­bly because I hadn’t woken up that early in a while. I took the train to down­town Man­hat­tan and walked to the Star­bucks at 35th and 8th, where I found a man in an orange shirt with a beam­ing smile. My host was Hal Stern ‘84, Chief Archi­tect for the Devel­oper Busi­ness Unit of Juniper Net­works. After brief intro­duc­tions, we started imme­di­ately; Mr. Stern gave me an overview of his com­pany as well as a crash course in com­puter net­works. It was a field that I was rather unversed in, but as I soon found out, had every­thing to do with my inter­est in com­puter sci­ence and technology.

We first vis­ited Chris­t­ian Mar­tin, a net­work mod­el­ing and sim­u­la­tion expert. In addi­tion to enlight­en­ing me on com­puter net­works, he also gave me a great amount of advice about col­lege. The point that struck me the most, how­ever, was his empha­sis on the impor­tance of “learn­ing how to learn.” My host him­self was a tes­ta­ment to that state­ment as he had only dived into net­work­ing rather recently. But with a strong back­ground in Com­puter Sci­ence and the skills acquired at Prince­ton, that tran­si­tion was made much more manageable.

I had spo­ken to Mr. Stern about my inter­est in star­tups, so he intro­duced me to two com­pa­nies he was cur­rently involved with. We had lunch with Camp­bell McKel­lar, the founder of Loose­cubes. Her site was designed to “con­nect peo­ple who have great work­space with peo­ple who need it.” Lis­ten­ing to her speak really brought to life the numer­ous, frus­trat­ing chal­lenges every startup faces as well as the even greater pride in over­com­ing those chal­lenges. After hav­ing explored her site and lis­ten­ing to her talk, I became very inter­ested in the con­cept of “co-working” and offered to intern at her office for a week, a propo­si­tion she hap­pily agreed to.

For our last stop, we vis­ited Hotlist, a social network/event coor­di­nat­ing site, located in what may very well be the coolest studio-turned-office space in SoHo. We spoke with Gianni Mar­tire, the co-founder of Hotlist, who gave me invalu­able advice on entre­pre­neur­ship and the tech-world in gen­eral. His excite­ment and pas­sion for his work rubbed off on me, as I left fully con­vinced that I want to work at a startup after graduating.

Through­out the day, Mr. Stern and I talked about every­thing we found inter­est­ing; some was infor­ma­tive, oth­ers less rel­e­vant, but nonethe­less extremely inter­est­ing. Although it was but just a day in New York, it was quite the day. Hav­ing the oppor­tu­nity to meet such inter­est­ing and knowl­edge­able indi­vid­u­als was an invalu­able expe­ri­ence and intro­duced me to a much larger world out­side the Orange Bubble.