Tech Sizzle: Student Hypes Hot Technology on Science Blog
Most college students use Web sites to hang out with friends and talk about their favorite musicians. But a Cornell engineering student who grew up playing on the floor of his father’s factory and whose favorite magazine is MIT’s Technology Review is using the Web to turn a new generation on to science and engineering. With technizzel.com, Ben Jabbawy ’08 ORE has given engineering students a place to rave about the hippest new technology and science. And high school students all over the world, bored with out-of-date textbooks and curious about subjects like iPhones, Nintendo Wii, and wind farms, are reading the stories avidly.
"What we’re trying to do is excite American high school students about engineering, science, and math," says Jabbawy, an articulate speaker and broad thinker who majored in Operations Research and Engineering. While at Cornell, he also played intramural soccer and was recruitment chair for his fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi.
Technizzel, which joins a growing network of science blogs, is emblematic of a new wave of science communication being designed by young people for young readers. They don’t have the patience to wait for results to be published in traditional journals. Instead, they’re creating their own quick and dirty way to share information about rapidly evolving technology. (Cell phones with digital cameras make it easy to include snazzy images.) Jabbawy’s on the crest of a new media for a new generation.
"A lot of people involved in technology are also entrepreneurs, so having these webzines as outlets allows people to find great ideas, to connect to other people all over the world, and to continue with the innovation process," says Jabbawy.
Technizzel is a project that Jabbawy created in his spare time. It’s an outlet for his entrepreneurial spirit, one that he discovered not in classes, but in a series of internships he has held. "It’s crucial for an engineer to test out different career paths," he says. "In school, it’s all about engineering courses. My internships really provided a place for me to see how people run a business."
In high school, Jabbawy spent a summer working for Nantero Inc. in Woburn, Mass., where he used a scanning electron microscope to examine computer chips and etch off misaligned carbon nanotubes. "It was just about the coolest thing I could have done in high school!" says Jabbawy.
While at Cornell, he researched potential investments at Lux Research in New York, a nanotechnology market research firm owned by College of Arts and Life Sciences alumnus Joshua Wolfe ’99. Other internships included one in the wealth management division of UBS in New York, developing a computer program to predict changes in the short-term market; and most recently a summer spent working on business development for an alternative energy start-up company, GreatPoint Energy Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., which creates natural gas from coal. That internship led to his first job—after graduation, he’ll join the venture capital firm, GreatPoint Ventures, as a venture associate, where he will scope out emerging technologies and advise investors on which hot ideas they should support.
Engineering and entrepreneurship run in Jabbawy’s family: his father, Samuel, is an engineer who owns NES Technologies Inc., a contract manufacturing firm. And his mother, Carole, has a doctorate in education and owns Internship Connection, a company that helps high school and college students find internships. Both his older brothers are also Cornell alumni with the business bug; Nat ’02 owns an interactive Web design and advertising firm, NeueTuesday, and Michael ’04 is a corporate lawyer.
The family mix of engineering, education, and entrepreneurship has very naturally led Jabbawy to Technizzel, a project he hopes to continue while he moves into the work world. Technizzel currently gets more than 5,000 hits per month and is written by student volunteers. Jabbawy hopes to expand both the topics explored and also the recruiting possibilities, both for the schools whose projects are featured on the webzine and for the writers, who can direct potential employers to their articles.
"It sounds kind of cheesy," says Jabbawy, "but I really would like Technizzel to make a difference. I had direct exposure to engineering. But for students in high school who don’t necessarily know anyone who is an engineer, the concept of engineering is a foreign thing. The goal of Technizzel is to show these students how cool engineering is."
—Bridget Meeds
