The floor is open to all of us in the NYC tech/entrepreneurship/academic community to share and contribute.  Let’s go! (And don’t worry about how old you are…)

Picture: @wesleyross

I am taking a series of classes organized by Tech@NYU this summer.  These awesome guys are a student organization with the aim of bringing the tech and entrepreneurship communities together.  It’s great.  We meet every Wednesday evening at the Courant Institute (you can’t help but feel a little more intelligent in there), and for 2 hours we get a crash course in various programming languages.  Last week it was JavaScript and JQuery, this week it was Ruby.  I love these sessions for 2 primary reasons.  First, they’re perfect for someone like me, who is not an expert coder, but wants to understand enough to be able to traverse from the Geekosphere to TechNotAtAll Land.  Second, it’s run by students.  I’m very used to this kind of approach having just spent 2 years at ITP.  Our Thursday evening student-led DriveBy sessions covered every topic imaginable, from how to be a VJ, to math for artists.  A couple of weeks ago I co-hosted one on the World Cup.  Not only are the DriveBys at ITP incredibly informative, they are a really effective way to build community, and to get to know your peers.

Here’s the thing though.  I heard tonight in the seminar one of the very capable speakers asking if anyone minded that it was students taking the class, and the fact that they possibly younger than some of the attendees – would this be a problem?  The answer from me was a resounding “duh – are you kidding me?!”  I am astounded and continually thankful here in the NYC tech-entrepreneurship-academic community at how open and willing people are to listen to others, if they’ve got smart stuff to share, whether they are bearded and grey, or bearded and spotty.

The floor is yours guys, have confidence, you are doing a great job.