Plexus Knowledge LLC, New York, NY
This summer, I was honored to have the opportunity to work alongside Davey Morse ’22.5, Matt Schleifman ’21, and Carson Kurtz ’22 at Plexus Knowledge. Founded by Davey, Plexus is a budding education technology start-up based out of New York City that developed a new type of note-taking, based on the fundamental unit of human thinking: the connections between our ideas.
At Plexus, I led outreach and education efforts (while Davey, Matt, and Carson worked on the engineering side of things). Much of my work involved browsing through different communities on EphLink and then cold-emailing alums to ask for advice. While reaching out to complete strangers was initially daunting, I was amazed at the number of responses I received and the enthusiasm and warmth with which my emails were often met. At the beginning of the summer, I focused primarily on connecting with alums in education-adjacent fields (teachers or administrators in middle and high schools), though I also reached out to professors, doctors, social workers—basically anyone who might have to take lots of notes for their job. Towards the end of the summer, as we began thinking about steps for Plexus going forward and applying to start-up accelerators, I centered my efforts on talking to alums in marketing, start-ups, and consulting. After talking to alums, I would add them to our email list (I sent out monthly news blasts about the team and our progress) and ask them if they could refer me to anyone else who might be able to provide useful feedback. Using the alumni network was a great way to get advice and get people excited about and on board with the idea behind Plexus (in Davey’s words, to create “Plexus fanatics”), but it was also a fantastic opportunity to practice my own networking skills and to build personal connections.
I also spent time compiling resources for Black Lives Matter using Plexus. This was a great way to self-educate on anti-racist practices and to use Plexus’s concept-map feature to display information about BLM in a new and useful format. In addition, I worked with Davey on the Plexus pitch deck, thinking about and fleshing out use cases for Plexus, and discussing how to pitch Plexus to investors.
Working at Plexus this summer was a great opportunity for me to dip my toes into the world of tech and entrepreneurship. While working at Plexus hasn’t steered me sharply toward coding/engineering, it has helped me realize that writing clearly and communicating with others are just as important in the start-up world as anywhere else. On a totally separate note, talking to various different alums made me realize that I’m really interested in going into a career in education, social work, or both. I’m deeply grateful to the ’68 Center for Career Exploration for making my work this summer possible.
Megamenu Social