🎯 Introduction
The Hsing Fellowship program boosts the tech careers of recent Columbia graduates. Over the course of the year, a small, carefully curated peer group will build community and be mentored by more senior alumni pursuing various paths in technology.
💡 Why the Hsing Fellowship?
Tech careers are flexible — and complex to navigate. Career paths in tech are more varied and less obvious than finance, consulting, or other careers. We connect fellows with alumni who pursued career paths as managers, founders, academics, senior individual contributors, and tech leaders in non-tech industries.
Community matters. The computer science major has grown dramatically at Columbia over the past decade, but tech careers are still underrepresented. The Hsing Fellowship will expand your network beyond your Columbia friend group — across age ranges, backgrounds, and interests — to help you explore those potential careers.
Early mentorship makes a difference. In your first few years out of college, you have more choices — and more to gain from mentorship. We hope the Columbia community can make an early impact in supporting you, so that you might feel more committed to helping others in turn down the road.
📅 Program Overview
Our second Fellowship class will run from September 2025 to May 2026, with programming including:
A kickoff Community Day with activities to help break the ice and create friendships.
A series of four dinners (one every ~6 weeks); we’ll help arrange alumni guests who have relevant perspective on topics of interest to the group, such as management, technical leadership, and entrepreneurship.
A Commencement Day to reflect on our Fellowship learnings, connect with previous fellows, and discuss how to sustain our community moving forward.
Along the way we’ll have a few casual social gatherings like happy hours, picnics, and potluck dinners to enjoy each other’s company. We’ll support fellows in self-organizing these.
Because mutual commitment is the most important ingredient in a close-knit community, Fellows will be expected to attend each event.
🛣️ Our First Cohort
Our 2024-2025 inaugural cohort featured 12 fellows and 13 guest speakers over four dinners. Throughout the program, fellows shared a spirit of ambition, curiosity, and generosity — supporting each other as they thought deeply about their next steps within tech.
During the fellowship:
Andrew (BA ‘24) was accepted to Y Combinator, and graduated having raised $2.1m in seed financing to help companies improve their AI brand perception.
Alex (BS ‘22) transitioned from his year as a Fulbright Scholar in Munich to enrolling at Harvard Medical School, with plans to contribute to computer vision research.
Lynne (BS ’22) started work at a battery startup, changed roles within the company, and decided to embark on focused research in safety and control systems for grid scale batteries at Stanford.
Every fellow navigated major career decisions and transitions.
This “Cohort 0” forms the basis of what we hope will be a lifelong community of Hsing Fellows, leaning on each other and future cohorts both professionally and personally.
“I loved having a reason every couple of weeks to pause and reflect on my career—where it’s headed, what I want from it, and how I might get there. It gave me space to think more intentionally about what I want my work life to look like.”
— Kevin (BS ‘22), Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic
“The dinner with the founders really stuck with me—they were all super inspiring. But to be honest, every session brought something valuable. I loved how each one had its own theme, so we could really dive deep into different aspects of building a career. It made the whole experience feel well-rounded and purposeful.”
— Nathalie (BS ‘21, MS ‘22), Technical Program Manager at Amazon Robotics
“Prior to the fellowship I didn't realize how strong and accessible the community of Columbia technologists is. Just meeting these people made me feel more confident in my path, and demonstrated how I can better take advantage of my Columbia network.”
— Matthew (BA ‘22), Software Engineer at a Series A Startup
👥 Our Alumni Mentors
We’d like to thank more senior alumni who participated in our first cohort as mentors:
Alaz Sengul & Martin Hunt, Co-Founders of Garage
Angela McNeal, Founder of Thread AI
Brian Wu, VP of AI/ML at GGWP
Dan Schlosser, Co-Founder of Ambrook
Harry Lee, PhD at Columbia
Hyonjee Joo, Technical Staff at Anthropic
Ian Zapolsky, Head of Product at Check
Jillian Ross, PhD at MIT CSAIL
Justin Zhao, formerly Senior Research Engineer at Google
Keren Baruch, Director of Product at LinkedIn
Michael Retchin, Founder of Scale Medicine
Yoon-Ji Nam, Head of Consumer Growth at Loyal
It’s easy to make sense of a career trajectory in hindsight, but hard to see the journey looking ahead. These mentors helped fellows explore the many ways to get from point A to B.
🔍 Seeking Our Second Cohort
We aim to assemble a class of talented early-career technologists, with diversity across sectors, industries, roles, and personal background.
Our second class will be based in New York City.
Fellows will be in their first three years of working in technology, and within four years of graduating, with some flexibility especially for candidates who bring unique perspectives.
We define "technology employers" broadly — not just software and internet companies — and especially encourage applicants working in frontier fields like biology, space, climate, and decentralized networks.
Fellows might work full-time in engineering, product, business, or other roles. Others might be pursuing academic fellowships, research projects, or founding new ventures advancing technology.
We warmly encourage candidates with nontraditional pathways into tech, where the community can be especially impactful — including:
joining early-stage startups,
pursuing personal research or open-source work,
working in tech in non-technical roles,
or being the first in their personal network or family to work in tech.
🤝 Cohort Selection Process
We are actively recruiting recent graduates interested in this Fellowship Program.
Our co-organizers will connect individually with candidates to help assemble a class with a rich diversity of perspectives.
We expect demand to exceed available spots this year but hope to expand the program over time — including to other geographies beyond NYC.
→ If you're interested in joining the Fall 2025 class, please fill out this interest form!
If you know anyone that might be interested, send this page their way.
🕊️ Honoring Peter Hsing
In memory of Peter Hsing (BS ’90), we are proud to rename this program the Hsing Fellowship for Young Alumni in Tech with the launch of our second cohort. Peter’s distinguished career spanned roles as Managing Director of the Corporate Strategy Group at Microsoft, founder of the early-stage venture capital firm Merus Capital, and member of Columbia Engineering’s Entrepreneurship Advisory Board.
A passionate mentor to Columbia students and graduates starting their journeys in technology, Peter exemplified the values of community, leadership, and service that this Fellowship seeks to honor and inspire.