from Hacker News

Connecting the UK Student Tech Scene

by asronline on 8/15/14, 9:31 AM with 44 comments

  • by willmw101 on 8/15/14, 11:22 AM

    UCL has been organizing well attended Hackathons, seed funding pitch competitions, partnerships with founders and accelerators as well as running its own mini incubator for the past few years. Even a quick skim on google would show a multitude of student (UCL) born startups that have succeeded: Loom, backed by Google Ventures and acquired by Dropbox this year + Vungle, raised $17MM series B this year. I understand that from a Kings perspective the tech scene looks weak, but to discredit the scene as a whole when UCL has been leading the way with significant success for the past few years, is misleading.

  • by EmlynC on 8/15/14, 1:55 PM

    I am committee member of the PyData London Meetup and I'd argue that the tech scene in London is simply more vibrant outside of the universities at the various meetups, hacker spaces and conferences so often you are better served going to those than a University society.

    There is a certain amount of red tape organising events at Universities (my basis for this is KCL and Imperial) unless they are either explicitly educational and you often have to liase with security so we've had a lot less friction by engaging tech companies to host meetings. You get the industry links by making use of their facilities, you get students, devs and business types and in all honesty companies in Silicon Roundabout are gagging to look cool and host a meetup.

    Saying that, I'm about to start post-doc work at KCL (been here since Undergrad) so I'll be kicking around for the next 3 yrs so I'll be signing up.

  • by refrigerator on 8/15/14, 1:01 PM

    Great post! I can completely relate to what was described in the first paragraph - before going to university my impression was that loads of people would be working on cool projects (not even necessarily tech-related) and that it would be really inspiring, but unfortunately when I got there this wasn't the case at all. I got the feeling that there was more cool tech stuff going on at London universities, but word never really got round to us. Our entrepreneurship society (Oxford Entrepreneurs, OE hereafter) seemed to be really disconnected with the 'tech society' (Oxford CompSoc) and the majority of people attending OE events were MBAs/other grad students. (The new OE committee are working hard to change this though)

    I think HackCampus is a great idea and is exactly what the UK tech scene needs. We (OE) are about to hold our first ever hackathon this November open to all students at all universities, and it seems many other universities are also starting to do the same, so a way to connect UK students interested in this kind of stuff is needed now more than ever.

    Best of luck to HackCampus and KCL Tech Society!

    Edit: I should add that a lot of Oxford alums have gone on to do really cool stuff, but I think a lot can be done to interest more undergrads in tech/entrepreneurship.

  • by radicality on 8/15/14, 12:59 PM

    I went to Imperial College London, graduated last year – we've also organized a couple of hackathons in the past years, and hosted the main Seedcamp event in 2012. There is also the Imperial Ventures and Imperial Create Lab. I can say that the amount of student tech scene stuff in Imperial has increased over the 4 years I was there, during year 1 I can't really remember any events like that, so it's good the community is picking up speed in the right direction.

    But as you say, what's important is that the different universities are not disconnected – organizing+advertising hackathons and hosting big events like Seedcamp is a good way to connect the students across universities.

  • by gordonguthrie on 8/15/14, 12:18 PM

    Techmeetup http://techmeetup.co.uk/ already covers all of Scotland and has goodish contacts with UCL and Seedcamp and stuff...

  • by Tinned_Tuna on 8/15/14, 10:32 AM

    I agree that the UK Student tech scene is quite disconnected.

    There are quite a few computer science oriented student societies. For instance, at York (where I did my undergrad) there's HackSoc. There's an IRC channel somewhere on freenode with computer science societies from the uk. We're not completely disconnected, but we're slowly growing to the point that we can start collaborating and having friendly competitions.

  • by ibisum on 8/15/14, 11:20 AM

    My experience with the tech scene in the UK leads me to believe that it is the class system which has to be broached in order for this to be broken wide open. Too often in English society clear class division is used to keep people out of touch with each other - I saw very clear examples of this in the hackerspace scene, wherein I noticed with great dismay the typical 'sterotype-casting' of individuals, whose technological prowess was not insignificant, working against them. The idea of "dirty student techies stinking up the lab" was far too prevalent - even in the hackerspace scene. British culture takes too much pride in its classist attitudes, as embodied in much of its culture, and I think this definitely works against any effort to build a broader community.

    Generally, I'd hope that the 'tech classes' rapidly dissuade themselves of any of the so-called virtues of British classism, but this isn't something thats necessarily on the table. Too often, bigotry and prejudice gets in the way of technological progress; this is very much the case, in my experience, within the UK tech sector.

  • by flurdy on 8/15/14, 1:20 PM

    For more a startup mostly tech career fair in London there is the popular Silicon Milkroundabout. https://www.siliconmilkroundabout.com/ Milkround 8 is in November.

  • by royroyroys on 8/15/14, 1:36 PM

    last couple of years, the 3beards have been pretty good at organising tech events like 'art hackathons' and hackathons with companies in London.

    think a tech scene doesn't need to be exclusive to students.