Govt. Shutdown Interns Get Help From Hacker Dojo

It couldn’t have happened in a better place than Silicon Valley. With an old-school bulletin board posting - and a new school Tweet - a NASA intern mobilized Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial community.

At Mountain View’s “Hacker Dojo” - part workspace and part community center - the director of development immediately started trying connecting interns displaced by the government shutdown from NASA Ames with entrepreneurs looking for talent.

Katy Levinson is a former NASA intern herself and says the fact that the government shutdown cost some of the best and brightest students the internships of a lifetime is a crime.

“When I was in college, I was dead broke and if were me I would’ve been 3,000 miles from home and you can’t even fly home because you don’t know when you’re going to be demanded back at work so these kids are in a scary rough situation,” Levinson said.

When Levinson asked for volunteers among startup creators, many jumped at the chance to have interns as highly vetted as the ones from NASA Ames.

Hacker Dojo created an email specifically to try to connect the NASA Ames interns with willing startups.

That addresses is government-shutdown-help@hackerdojo.com.

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