Looking for talented young developers? PennApps Fellows has you covered

PennApps Fellows is making it super easy for local tech companies to find summer dev talent.

Backed by the city’s StartUp PHL grant program, the ten-week internship program that caters to college and high school students placed eight students at local companies last summer. Last summer, 150 students applied, said organizer Fabio Fleitas.

This summer’s program is looking to be even more selective, Fleitas added: 150 students have already applied and he expects hundreds more to apply, as PennApps Fellows starts reaching out to schools and the PennApps community. The program will choose ten to 20 fellows.

The PennApps Fellows management team has grown from three to 15, including three former PennApps Fellows. They’re currently in talks with sponsors and other grant-awarding organizations to fund the program, Fleitas said, adding that the program has $25,000 soft-committed. PennApps Fellows covers the cost of housing for interns but companies must pay them.

Penn Medicine’s Chief Innovation Officer Roy Rosin, formerly the VP of Innovation for Intuit, has also joined the PennApps Fellows team, which will help keep the program going as organizers graduate. Fleitas is currently a Penn junior and a developer at StartUp PHL-backed company Tesorio.

This is exactly the type of effort that the city wanted to fund with its StartUp PHL “Call for Ideas” grant, said Commerce Department spokeswoman Rebecca Lopez-Kriss.

“StartUp PHL, of course, is thrilled because this is exactly how the Call for Ideas grants are supposed to work,” she wrote in an email. “An organization has an idea, gets a little bit of funding to get the idea off the ground, and in the end creates a successful program that can either be self sustaining, or has been proven enough for other funders to get onboard.”