Program Reviews

I've learned so much from my internship about tech startups and venture capital. I did many projects in data analysis at the startup i was matched to and I had a great working with my teammates. I also had a great number of friends who are also Sage Corp fellows. I now better understand what I wish to do and I hope Sage Corps can continue to help me in the future

I spent my time with Sage Corps abroad in Dublin, Ireland. I was matched with the tech startup Novaerus where I worked as a research and development engineering. Here I was in charge of my own individual project that will actually be further developed into a final product. The experience I gained here will be extremely valuable for getting hired in the future. While the job was great, the best part of the program by far was the people and the living environment. I had an amazing time in Dublin and spent all my weekends traveling the country, the UK, and even got over to Denmark. The CEO of sage corps, Matt, was extremely devoted to us and truly cared about our experience. Living and working in Dublin really made me feel part of the culture rather than just being a study abroad tourist. I would recommend this program to anyone. You are in good hands with Sage Corps.

Over the two months I worked at a tech startup on software development and maintenance. I did not know much going into the internship but was able to build a fully functional website (mainly back-end) for my startup in the end. I also wrote test cases for a web app. Besides, I learned a great deal about entrepreneurship and startups in Asia in general. Singapore has amazing food, tourist attractions and night life. It is also easy to travel abroad to see the completely different cities in Southeast Asia.

Sage Corps provided me with the opportunity to work abroad without having to feel lost. They placed me in a startup that perfectly matched my professional aspirations and made sure everything was going smoothly. The staff based in Chicago was very present over email and the country managers on the ground in Buenos Aires were amazing. They planned interesting events for us every week. The social component of the program was also very helpful as it gave me opportunities to meet people at first when I didn't know anyone there. I feel like I learned all the professional skills I wanted to acquire during my internship and I got an incredibly enriching experience. Working alongside Argentine entrepreneurs was the best way to exchange every day and learn about the culture. The true differential factor of Sage Corps is that you have a frame that provides lots of reassurance while also being fully immersed.

I'm currently a student at Penn and I am very passionate about entrepreneurship. I had the chance to go back and work at a bulge bracket bank, and set myself up to work for them and make great money. I turned it down because I wanted to experience abroad life and working at a startup and I happily now know I made the right decision.

First, Dublin is an amazing city with great social life and startup culture. Everyone is a hustler out there, looking for the next unicorn. That gives you the chance to learn from everyone you talk to. Secondly, Matt and the Sage Corps program did an awesome job setting up events and activities for us to meet the right people in the VC/startup community and have fun. We got to visit and speak with people from a top VC firm, the NDRC, and the Google office. On top of that, the quality of startups that Sage Corps is partnered with there are the best of the best.

Sage Corps made the introduction very easy and placed me somewhere they knew I would succeed. The startup where I was placed as a Business Development intern, Popdeem, is a social rewards platform. They not only had the most potential out of all the startups I saw in Dublin, but they are an amazing team which was always willing to help me learn. I learned everything from day-to-day operations of startups, culture, financing, business development, etc. I even became a pro at using Adobe Photoshop for design!

Sage Corps also has a program coordinator based in Dublin that you speak with every week just in case you ever need anything and he also helps coordinate great social events. There is also great opportunities to get jobs at the startups you work. Many of the fellow Sage Corps I went with either got return offers, one ended up even starting her own company there. Overall, Sage is an amazing program and it's a program I would recommend to anyone and everyone. Great job, Matt, it was an experience I enjoyed so much.

I loved working with Parsimotion this summer. I learned a lot of Twitter Bootstrap, Jade, Sass, Angular JS, and basic software programming while working with a team of inspired and passionate entrepreneurs. It was a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to learn, grow, and expand my professional skill set.

The work was very rewarding and fun, I made a lot of very close friends in the Sage Corps cohort in Singapore. And the city of Singapore was the best of all - it was clean, safe, efficient, diverse and had so much to offer. And the Sage Corps staff was very helpful as well.

Growth and comfort rarely coexist. I warmed up to my very patient and intelligent roommate, Adam, immersed myself fully into CoCoon's ecosystem, backpacked through Hong Kong's mountains alone, and fell in love with the district's culture. For these wonderful events to happen, I left friends back in Chicago, lived with once a complete stranger, arrived to a country that silos me as a foreigner despite similar cultural roots, and embraced loneliness in a busy city. I now carry with me lessons learned then to my internship with Freshwater Advisors led by David Weinstein, Chicago's seriel entrepreneur. Then, I dream to jumpstart a traditional yoga studio and physical therapy clinic that integrates appropriate cutting-edge innovation to better my community's well-being.

While initially hesitant about joining the program, as I would be joining it's second program ever, the interview process gave me more confidence in the program. The CEO, Matt Meltzer, was very supportive and dedicated to providing a quality experience tailored to my interest. As a chemistry major and a statistics minor, I was unsure if my skills would even be applicable to start-ups, let alone international ones. Instead, I was given a great opportunity that catered to my interests and pushed me out into the burgeoning field of data analytics.

The Internship:
I worked for The CloudMiner Ltd., a data-mining and financial services company targeting the commodities industry. During the Sage Corps interview process, I spoke to one of the co-founders, Dan Bloor, who talked to me on how I could apply my statistical knowledge to their business challenges. As a web based company, all the focus was on their website product and I, along with another Sage Corps Fellow, was tasked to build a data-visualization platform to better express the company's aggregated data on mines around the world. I had very little programming experience prior to this internship but I can now comfortably program in Javascript, Python, CSS, and HTML thanks to the support of The CloudMiner team, my co-worker James Xue (studying Computer Science at Columbia), and dedicated hours outside of work. By the end of the program, we had built a powerful data-visualization tool that The CloudMiner still uses.

Day-to-Day:
The Sage Corps program fully immersed us in the entrepreneurial scene in Hong Kong; we visited co-working spaces (The Good Lab, Cocoon HK), enjoyed speaker events (Simon Squibb and Guy Parsonage of fluid), and visited local businesses to learn about Hong Kong's business situation (JLL Hong Kong). The CloudMiner personally took James and I to a product presentation of a similar product (Tableau) for business insights and networking. We stayed at the Harbor Plaza Hotel, great accommodations for such a cramped city with immediate access to the Hong Kong MTR system and buses.

The daily schedule was as follows:
- Wake up at 8, get to work by 10
- Work on fixing bugs or improving visualization platform features or begin working on new functionality
- Have lunch around 12:30 with the entire team at a local restaurant
- Return to work with various snacks that James picked out from the malls nearby
- Finish work around 18:00, take recommendations from The CloudMiner team for dinner
- Work out at the Harbor Plaza basement gym with 4 other Sage Corps Fellows and sauna after

Highlights:
- Each of the Sage Corps fellows were incredibly driven, focused, and willing to explore - some of the best people I have ever met. Everyone was interested in learning more about start-ups and becoming entrepreneurs, making the most out of their summer. We passed around a copy of the Lean Startup to read on our commutes, went to the gym together, and we visited Macau twice throughout our trip.
- I learned a completely foreign skill. Like I said earlier, I had little prior programming experience but I can now program in Javascript, Python, CSS, HTML and currently learning R and Apache Spark for data analysis.
- Experienced first-hand the business practices and ideas of a foreign country. We were educated on Hong Kong's real estate situation by JLL Hong Kong; James Guzy (another co-founder of The CloudMiner) talked at length about the difference between Hong Kong and mainland China's business attitudes. The co-working spaces we visited, especially Cocoon HK, were incredibly gracious and shared with us their resources such as pitch nights and free-lance opportunities.
- Sage Corps programming: a boat tour of Hong Kong with our country managers
- Bungee jumping off the world's tallest bungee jump in Macau

Difficulties:
- A few language barriers, I'm not fluent in Chinese. Luckily most of Hong Kong is Englicized and another Fellow was a native speaker from Beijing. We never were stuck anywhere and could always find someone to communicate with.

Through Sage Corps, I secured an internship with the CloudMiner Ltd, a tech startup in Hong Kong. I worked on a data visualization project in Javascript that helped me jumpstart my career in CS.

Sage Corps is a great program for students looking to doing real work at an innovative company, develop important networking skills, and expand their worldview by going abroad. Working abroad is incredibly valuable, and working for a startup is a great way to meet exciting people and learn practical skills - for me, it was hands-on web development.

On top of the work experience, Hong Kong has a vibrant, energetic, and youthful vibe with a budding startup community. It's a great place for college students to develop skills that they would not get in the classroom or even in America. Socially, there's something going on that you'll never be bored. Culturally, it's fascinating to interact with the locals, learn some Cantonese, and of course, eat the delicious cuisine!

I loved the summer I spent at CloudMiner, and I'm very glad that I did the program. I'm excited to see Sage Corps expand to new locations!