York IE is excited to announce the Summer 2020 intern class. A class filled with honest, hands on, and hungry young adults that are already familiar with the daily grind of the startup life. Coming from a wide range of New England area schools, we are thrilled to introduce this summer’s intern class.
Caroline Hoffer, Providence College:
As the spring semester came to a close, I was grateful to receive the opportunity to join York IE as a summer intern. I knew this opportunity was special as I spoke with Joe Raczka, a managing partner, about the company and what my role as an intern would look like. I was invited by Joe to meet with other members of the York IE team beginning with Mike Veilleux. As Mike explained his involvement in the company’s product, his passion for the company and his work was evident in every word he spoke. His excitement drew me in deeper to the company’s mission of providing a unique experience and “recipe for success” for each startup. Soon after, I had a discussion with Adam Coughlin which sealed the deal on my decision to join the team, as his knowledge and background in marketing and journalism are unparalleled. I was confident that working under Adam and Kate Campbell would help me prepare for my future career in marketing. My day at York IE allowed me to see how commitment, discipline, passion, and perseverance can lead to a successful and ever growing company. I have already gained more business knowledge than I could have ever hoped. I am inspired by the people around me. York IE has welcomed me to its team. A team whose goal is to not only provide creative support for startups, but also provide support for one another. A team will not win unless there is unity and York IE is unified from upper management to interns. York IE emphasizes the value of each member of its team which sets it apart from other internships. I am excited to contribute to this winning team!
Erik Sherkanowski, University of New Hampshire:
My name is Erik Sherkanowski and I am currently going into my senior year at UNH where I’m studying Finance and Economics. Outside of the classroom, I am actively engaged in our business school’s student run investment group where I do market research. When I started the summer internship search, I knew that I was looking for a small firm where I would be able to gain a wide variety of experience. I quickly got connected with Joe Raczka, who I knew through his success locally with Dyn, and was able to hear more about York IE’s “hybrid approach” towards investing. After speaking with Joe, I immediately recognized York IE’s clear investing strategy that put entrepreneurs at the forefront. After speaking with a few other team members and hearing how passionate they were, not only about work but York IE’s vision, I knew this was an environment and team that I wanted to be a part of. I look forward to learning the ins and outs of the business this summer and am excited to be a part of a team that plans to break the current mold of venture capital.
Dylan Wheeler, University of New Hampshire:
Ever since I discovered my passion for entrepreneurship at UNH, I have been deeply fascinated by startups and venture capital. I started following New Hampshire’s startup ecosystem much more closely and got extremely excited when I saw that some former Dyn employees came together to start York IE. Coming from the perspective of an entrepreneur, I appreciated York IE’s mission to reshape the way startups are built by having investors work even closer with their portfolio companies and becoming an even greater value-add for entrepreneurs beyond mere financial support. York IE is accomplishing this through an internal research platform that they will be able to use to generate hyper-custom research reports for their portfolio companies. These reports will better equip founders to make sense of all the industry data available while dealing with rapidly changing markets and competitive landscapes. I was invited to join the team and help build out this research tool–an opportunity so impactful that I couldn’t turn it down! I am looking forward to working with Mike Veilleux and the York IE team to help make this research platform a reality while learning even more about venture capital. I am excited to leverage my background as a UNH Rines Angel Fund alumnus to drive the future of York IE and, ultimately, local entrepreneurship as a summer intern.
Joe Small, University of Southern Maine:
A classic refrain from students forced to sit through their required Math courses is, “When will I ever use this stuff?” I once counted myself among their skeptical ranks, struggling to picture a life in which graphing functions and memorizing theorems would even be interesting, let alone useful. As a Freshman pursuing my degree in Computer Science I took my licks and sat through professors droning on about calculus and discrete math, that ever-present mathematical skepticism bubbling beneath the surface. One day, during a particularly dry lecture, one of my fellow students finally blurted out what we’d all been thinking: “When will we ever use this?”. The professor, a tenured mathematician of over 50 years, turned to him and replied flippantly, “Well you probably won’t, but someone in the class might. So why don’t you just let me teach?”. Those words stuck with me, and in an introductory statistics course I finally saw the applied power of mathematics at work. The esoteric theorems I studied became tools for answering real-world questions. The graphs I plotted told stories. I could use statistical models to make accurate predictions of the future, rivaling such prophetic visionaries as Nostradamus and Ms. Cleo. I was hooked. I dove deep into the subject, discovering its beauty through pure mathematics as well as the cutting-edge work that was being done in data science and machine learning. I could finally picture that world in which math was interesting, useful, and really, really cool! That revelation drove me to complete degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Southern Maine, and will continue my studies in Statistics and Data Science at the graduate level starting this Fall. I was introduced to the work being done at York IE through Head of York IE Labs Mike Veilleux, and after our first conversation I instantly saw a place that appreciated the power of mathematics, was on the cutting-edge of technology, and was genuinely interested in harnessing both to develop their product and gain valuable insight into a wide variety of domains. Later conversations only piqued my interest as a fledgling data scientist further. As a summer intern I saw an opportunity to have a hand in every part of the process, from data munging to datalake management to training and hosting models on cloud services. I saw a place that would encourage my love of math and technology and allow me to hone the skills I learned in academia. In York IE I saw a place where my interests and knowledge could come together and help make contributions to exciting work being done by a dedicated, like-minded team. I couldn’t be happier to be joining them!
