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Recently the Tuck Career Development Office took a group of incoming first year students to the Bay Area for a week of learning about the tech industry, career options in tech, and tech trends. The trip was designed to help students fully understand the industry before the busy recruiting season that begins only a few weeks after they first step onto campus.
The program, called the Silicon Valley Boot Camp, was created by the Tuck Career Development Office and targeted a wide range of students interested in tech industry careers – ranging from seasoned technology veterans to students looking to make a full pivot from their current career path and into the tech industry.
I was fortunate enough to be included in the boot camp and spent time with 38 talented students for the inaugural trip this month. The week was structured around a mix of company visits, guest speakers, and social/networking activities. We visited Google, Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, Zillow, OpenTable, and Boost Media. We heard from speakers covering topics ranging from recruiting at tech companies to investing in the tech space (and everything in between).

The week was productive, informative, and fun too (check out the pictures from our visit to Byington Vineyard & Winery below). I am excited to start the new school year running our Britt Technology Impact Series and have already seen some of the students from the trip around campus as they start to arrive.

As a bonus, I thought I’d share some common tech trends I heard across the week. This is by no means an exhaustive list and was compiled from numerous conversations during the week:

• Sharing Economy Continues to Expand: A recurring theme of the week was that firms like Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Lending Club are at the front end of the wave of sharing economy firms looking to disrupt a wide range of industries. Speaking of Lending Club…
• Finance Industry Ripe for Disintermediation: Lending Club, Bitcoin, Zillow, and other firms are all a threat to the existing financial services value chain.
• ACA Means Big Opportunities for Tech: The Affordable Care Act has been a hot IT topic for all the wrong reasons (healthcare.gov) but has opened the door to numerous new firms looking to enter the marketplace. Add that to the growing profile of alternative insurance firms like Collective Health (the subject of a front-page feature in WIRED this week) and the marketplace is ripe for new entrants.
• SaaS Will Continue to Grow: While cloud computing has been hot for a few years now, the traditional view was that SaaS implementations were more for smaller or mid-sized enterprises. Not so anymore, with a growing focus on SaaS implementations at large enterprises expected to grow and even speed up in the next few years.
• Infrastructure Investment Needed, Urgently: With so much growth in cloud delivery and with so many devices connected to the Internet, bandwidth limitations are a real threat to future growth.  Large-scale investments in high speed networking are needed to stem the coming squeeze.