CTP 10 Cohorts with Alan Chen

Iyeshia Redrick: Alan, can you tell us about yourself?

Alan Chen:?

I was born and raised in Brooklyn to immigrant parents and I went to school and college in the city. I attended Macaulay Honors for CUNY Baruch College and took classes at City College through CUNY BA, which allowed me to create my own major. If I’m being honest, this allowed me to take the classes that I wanted to take. After graduation, my career started at Rent the Runway, I was there for 7 years, rising from intern to manager. And now I am at Gemini as an Engineering Manager.

Iyeshia Redrick: Awesome, I love that. Intern to a manager, that’s awesome. Tell us you were part of CUNY Tech Prep. What was your experience like when you were active at CTP?

Alan Chen:

I was a part of the second cohort, which was still a little rough around the edges. Folks were still trying to figure out the best way to run the program. It’s improved dramatically since I've been there. CTP was a place to gain practical experience for your career, which you don’t get in the classroom. Most academia/classroom is based around just making sure that you have the theoretical knowledge, which is great. You should have the theoretical knowledge, but if you can’t apply it to a workplace setting or your career, then it won’t get you very far. CTP sort of filled in that gap. It was a bootcamp for students who had the theoretical knowledge, which is vastly different from the current boot camps that we have today where people are expected to gain both sets of knowledge without having the theoretical background. It was a great opportunity to gather like-minded individuals, work together, and improve your craft.

Iyeshia Redrick: Nice. Since you did CTP, what was your biggest takeaway from it?

Alan Chen:

My biggest takeaway or my favorite moment was that it’s so important to write code that isn’t just for an assignment. Something you’re passionate about or even care about a little bit, with other people who were ambitious and aligned with building something cool. Demo Night played a huge part in my role at CTP, just to have it on my resume. Demos didn’t have to be perfect. It was a place to motivate you to do hackathons without saying it’s a hackathon. Huge shout out to Edgardo Molina , he was the best comp science instructor that I could have asked for. Going through CTP showed me that there are comp sci instructors who can explain something very theoretical to you in a way that makes sense, which is not always the case. It's a challenging subject, I appreciated the opportunity to wrap my head around how to tackle technical interviews correctly, especially when it comes to data structures and algorithms.

Iyeshia Redrick: I like how you combined your biggest takeaway, exciting moment, and favorite moment with that. What was the biggest challenge for you in CTP?

Alan Chen:

Honestly, the biggest challenge was getting comfortable with interviews. We had career coaches, we had amazing instructors. But interviews are always tough because you don’t know how you do in them until you start having them. During my time, I don't believe we had robust mock interview sessions set up. That is something I find students should fully take advantage of. These are actual professionals in the industry interviewing other actual potential interns, even potential new hires. It's a great opportunity to get your feet wet, low risk, and get honest feedback, which you may not get during actual interviews. The biggest challenge was getting comfortable with interviews, something CTP now supports, as long as you take advantage of those opportunities.

Iyeshia Redrick: To clarify, when you say interviews, are you talking about technical, behavioral, or both?

Alan Chen:

Both. Behavioral ones are not that bad, right, in my opinion, I think the technical ones are the ones that are a little tougher. For behavioral, as long as people like you as a human being, you’re good to go, right, it’s a pass, especially if you’re an intern or you’re an entry-level engineer. The bar isn’t that high, especially if you’re not managing people. It’s about your technical skills and being able to leverage those in a soft skill setting. If you’ve done group projects you’ve done some form of collaboration with other students in a CTP program, you should be fine.

Iyeshia Redrick: What advice would you give the job-seeking fellows during this time?

Alan Chen:

I would lean into what I said before, taking advantage of those mock interviews offered by CTP. Everyone knows this already, but internships are key to full-time offers. It's difficult to compete with all the new graduates and everyone else that’s looking for a job in the industry right now. As interns, you have your foot in the door. All you have to do is do great as an intern, and you’ll get a return offer. The biggest takeaway here is that you can get your foot in the door, and internship interviews are 100% easier than new grad interviews. I can attest to that because I've interviewed both sets of folks. We set the bar lower, so take advantage of the lower bar where possible. It’s low risk for employers, too, because it’s like a three-month trial, and if we like you, we bring you back.

Iyeshia Redrick Why does CTP matter?

Alan Chen:

Going back to what I said before, CTP fills a missing need for CUNY students, providing them with experience centered around building a career. It is an opportunity to become familiar with the industry and themselves and also to find out, “Do I want to do web development?”, “Do I want to do data science?”. It’s a low-risk way of exploring without having to put multiple years of your career towards that. Sure, you’ll learn the concepts, and you’ll learn the work in school, but you won’t get a feel for interviewing for those roles or what it will be like to pursue a career in those roles. CTP sort of functions as a motivating mechanism to say, “Hey, we’ve laid out the path. These are all the templates and tools you have. You just have to go through the door and take on the challenge.”?

At school, it’s a little more vague. You have a bunch of academic work that may or may not tie back to your future career unless your career is in academia, which is a different path altogether. CTP is focused on just going into the industry itself and writing code so that you can build stuff for companies, nonprofits, any sort of industry, or any sort of entity that might need that talent.

Iyeshia Redrick: What is your biggest hope for the following ten cohorts of CTP?

Alan Chen:

This is a big one and also a tough question. Since I'm on the Advisory Board, too, I would like to know I can influence this. One big thing is brand recognition among employers and students. CTP is known among some companies, but I want it to be a well-known brand, in other words, for students as well.?

For students, CTP is considered a benefit to the college applicant when they look at the college application; they don’t think just, “Hey, I want to do computer science, let me go to one of the top ten universities” instead I would like students to consider CUNY and say “they got CTP though so maybe I should consider that in the application process.” It's sort of an extension of CUNY for comp science majors, data science majors, or whatever we may expand to in the future.

For employers, CTP needs to reach a level of prestige that acknowledges theoretical and practical experience, which is key and unique to CTP. We could get to that point where employers say, “Hey, you know this candidate is from CTP, maybe we should really consider them.” That would be amazing. That's definitely doable in the next ten cohorts.