This year’s class of PennApps Fellows is about 50% women

It’s the second summer of PennApps Fellows, the 10-week program that places young (mostly college, but some high school) developers at Philadelphia startups, and the fellowship has nearly doubled in size, with 14 students in this year’s cohort.
More than 400 students applied, said fellow Christina Zhu, a computer science major at UC Davis who’s working at Monetate this summer. Other fellows are working at startups like Guru, Viridity Energy and Picwell.
The fellowship, which pays for housing for its participants, is largely backed by Comcast, said co-organizer Sam Parmett. The program was searching for funding earlier this year. The first fellowship was sponsored by a City of Philadelphia StartUp PHL grant.
This summer’s group is also drastically more gender diverse than last year’s — about half of the fellows are women. The cohort is also largely made up of developers of color.
While a handful are from Penn, some (like Zhu) come from as far as California. There’s also one high schooler in the mix.
Learn more about the fellows
Zhu wrote to us: “So far, the fellows have volunteered at tech conferences like LibertyJS and have spent their Monday nights as Teacher Assistants for the Introduction to Coding class by PennHealthX. We’ve also paid visits to the infamous Love statue and Reading Terminal!”