How We See It: TechBoston offers eager summer help

As office air conditioners shift into gear, it seems safe to say that summer is here. The season is also evident in the eyes of students ready to break loose from their school books.

And that means, for many high school students, that it's time to start the summer job search. Many of us remember what that's like - finding ways to earn pocket money or save for college.

Ideally, it also involves picking up some useful experience. That's what TechBoston has in mind as it tries to fill at least 4,000 tech-related summer internship positions for high school students.

Part of the Boston Public Schools, TechBoston supports technology courses in K-12 classrooms. And it works with the Boston Private Industry Council to identify summer jobs. The group places kids in a range of private-sector organizations such as Immerge Biotherapeutics, IBM, Xerox, Fleet and State Street.

Kids like Lorell Webb take on IT projects and learn how to interact and communicate on teams. True to his name, Webb is a web designer and developer who went through the TechBoston experience.

"I feel lucky and blessed," he told the crowd at TechBoston's kickoff last week, explaining he has been accepted to Wentworth Institute of Technology in the fall.

As we slowly creep out of this recession (Cisco Systems' news last week that it will hire 1,000 tech workers certainly helps), let's hope that more local technology companies will take on summer interns. They would appear to have the most to gain by participating.

As Mass Software Council president Joyce Plotkin remarked, "There's a dark cloud on the horizon that the recession has masked; we're facing a shortage of tech workers in the United States."

If your company is easily reachable by T or train, consider taking on an intern or two. By getting them on the road to future tech careers, it's doing good in both the short and long term.

To get more information on the TechBoston internships, contact Jonathan Greeley at 617-488-1328 or Jonathan. Greeley@bostonpic.org.

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