By, Lara Janosz, Olivia Habart, Abhinav Iyer, Elisha Cooper, Maxwell Wen, Saarang Suryavanshi
Our organization started as a sticky note in a 1 credit BLI leadership class (ALA 174) in the Fall semester of 2023. During the first class session, everyone wrote brief project ideas of interest on sticky notes, and slowly, the class formed around groups with shared passions. Our sticky note read: help under-resourced students increase employability with tech literacy.
Our team’s desire then, as it is now, was to bridge the digital divide and make tech literacy more accessible for all students. Technique, now with two semesters under its belt, is an organization capable of building AI-based tools and hosting events for students with representatives from Apple and OpenAI, some of the largest tech companies in the world, in attendance.
Since Technique’s development, our mission to change the narrative surrounding learning tech skills and make the process of learning these skills more accessible and customizable has started to ring true to more University of Michigan students as we continue our efforts to expand.
The necessity of technical abilities in today’s job market is a topic increasingly at the forefront of students’ minds. As the anxieties of navigating such a tech-centric economy set in for many students with non-technical backgrounds, our team discovered an opportunity to empower students with the tools and resources to help them launch into successful careers, regardless of their academic majors or experience level with popular tech skills.
Project Overview
With this mission in mind, Technique’s project this semester (W’24) included 2 core components: (1) Build a website enhanced with AI-search capabilities to help students find the tech skills and resources most relevant to their interests, and (2) host a Generative AI showcase to both introduce our organization to the campus community and provide students from across the university to engage with various use-cases of Generative AI across industries. With generous support from the BLI Leadership Grants, our team was thrilled to see both of these components successfully met on April 12th, the day of our Generative AI showcase.
#1: Tech Career Exploration
A project that taught us about the BLI habit of starting small was our AI powered tech exploration tool. It helps students explore tech careers, the related skills, and resources to dive deeper into those skills, personalized by major.
Once Saarang, Max & Elisha joined the team, with backgrounds in Data Science, UX/UI and Computer Science, we had the right skill sets to build out a tech literacy tool we’d brainstormed during ALA 174, and over winter break. But, the problem was, we did not have a clear idea of the exact layout and features, and kept trying to build an ultra personalized tool, or include too many resources. Our final product, with a simple output of jobs, skills, and resources from a single input, a student’s major, represented our continuous work during development to start small. We only focus on one input and the top 3–5 outputs for each category. We will continue this approach as we build out additional features, alongside the habit of engaging the world, through continuous testing with our target users — students.
#2: Generative AI Showcase
From organizing the structure of the event, to inviting and coordinating presentations for our amazing speakers, to building a working prototype of our AI tool for our website, to marketing the event to students, our team worked tirelessly to allow this event to come to fruition. We were so grateful to have fantastic speakers join us for our showcase, each of them speaking to different use-cases of AI across various industries like law, business, education, accounting, creative writing, and more. Many of them also spoke to the ability of every student, regardless of academic background, to engage with AI. In other words, a major goal of our event was to show students that you don’t need to know how to code to leverage this amazing tool, emphasizing our organization’s mission to make tech literacy more accessible.
We were lucky to have the following speakers join us for the event: Dr. Sanjeev Kumar, Julian Hemmings, Lance Fuchia, KJ Green, and Ashley Austin.
To start off the event, our team introduced the event, and the concept that AI can be used for everyone, followed by the soft launch of our AI tool.
Lance Fuchia, a freshman at the University, shared details about an AI accounting firm startup, leveraging AI to make accounting simpler for small companies, AccoAI.
Julian Hemmings, an entrepreneur and 1st year student at the law school spoke virtually about his sci-fi book, Starseeds, where he used an AI tool Wambo to visualize all the characters and world, how he was seeing AI transform the practice of law, and his law firm he plans to open post graduation leveraging AI.
Karon Green, a dual degree MBA and MSI student, who goes by “KJ”, talked about his research regarding AI used in programming education.
Ashley Austin, a graduate of the University of Michigan with a BA in English and Latin who now works as a Content Strategist at Apple, helped us close out our event by emphasizing the importance of the humanities in tech, along with highlighting her experience as a student of Northwestern’s Master of Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship program.
Although we had huge goals for this first event, we were really excited to have over 40 attendees across zoom and in-person at the business school, and multiple one on one conversations on event attendee takeaways, including with the two OpenAI attendees.
Future Plans
Our team is excited to build upon the momentum from hosting our first event, and building out the first version of our career exploration tool. We were not only able to fulfill our initial BLI Leadership grant project goals, but create additional opportunities.
Through the process of building out our Tech Career Exploration tool, we were invited to pitch to a Venture Capital Firm in New York, Capital Placement, by one of our professors, Dr. Fretz.
Although we began this project with the vision of starting a nonprofit, we developed a for-profit model for the VC pitch, and it helped us start thinking more broadly about our project.
Over the summer, all six team members plan to continue with the project in some capacity, with additional team members joining soon.
We are exploring both starting a club on campus, launching in the F ’24 semester, and building upon our initial tool to create a “future of work” AI career coach. Our goal is for the coach to further decrease student’s anxiety about the future of work: rapid marketplace movements & increasingly important role AI and other technologies will play in our careers.
We’d love to get in touch with anyone interested in either of these initiatives at:
technique@umich.edu or reach us on Linkedin or Twitter @Techniquelit
