Monday, April 22, 2002

Education

Consulting group tackles dearth of tech internships

By Jeff Miller

Even if TechBoston reaches its goal of finding 700 summer internships for its high school students, Dick Snyder worries about the 1,000 TechBoston students who still won't have a tech job this summer.

So in lieu of finding jobs for the students, Snyder decided to create them.

The TechBoston Consulting Group now employs 10 students, supervised by two teachers, who work on Web development and networking projects for Massachusetts businesses and non-profits.

"We have a lot more kids wanting work than we do jobs," Snyder said. "But there are a lot of people who have short-term jobs (available) but they don't have time to manage the students."

The consulting group, which is just two months old, has completed two jobs. One involved helping a community development organization transfer its Web site from a Unix server to a Windows NT box.

During the transfer, the PERL scripts broke, causing disarray on the group's shareware bulletin boards. The TechBoston Consulting Group repaired the scripts, upgraded the BBS and reestablished their systems.

They're about to finish creating a Flash introduction for a site aimed at the African-American community, as well as some style sheets, menu structures and some of the site's core pages.

Their next project involves creating a Web site for a karate studio from scratch.

On the networking side, the group upgraded a set of old computers, and will soon tackle installing and networking a set of multifunction fax machines.

The students get paid $10 per hour for their work, which the organization bills out at $20 per hour. The margin pays for the teacher's overtime, a bit of marketing and for future expansion.

"My eventual goal is (to employ) 200 kids," Snyder said. "But I don't think we'll be able to do it with teachers at that point. We'll have to have hired managers."

TechBoston is bringing profession- al computer certification and robotics courses to 2,500 Boston public school students in 25 high schools and middle schools. The curriculum includes Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, A+ Computer Repair and Cisco Certified Network Professional, and Sun Java, just to name a few.

Mike Reilly teaches a Webmaster certification course at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. He also leads the Web group for the Boston Consulting Group.

It's a fortuitous appointment, given that just last year Reilly was doing much the same work as a consultant with Accenture.

Last year, Harvard University accepted his wife into its master's in technology and education program. Accenture's flex-leave program allowed Reilly to take a year off with full benefits and 20 percent of his pay.

Having taught high school math for a few years before joining Accenture, Reilly chose to re-enter the profession.

"Dick's goal is to employ 200 kids," Reilly said. "If we can't find the companies, we'll make the company."