Home

Chair's Message

50th Anniversary

Computer Scientist and Fashion Entrepreneur

Undergraduate Pairs Coding with Social Entrepreneurship

MIDAG Celebrates 40 Years

Maimone Honored with Inaugural Quigg Award

Department Awards

Department News

Alumni News

Family Matters

Recent Publications

The Back Page

 

Undergraduate Pairs Coding with Social Entrepreneurship

Henry Fuchs

Jake Bernstein isn’t your average undergraduate student. The junior computer science major is a Morehead-Cain scholar at UNC and a member of the Chancellor’s Student Innovation Team. He also participates in Carolina Outreach and in the Richard A. Baddour Carolina Leadership Academy as part of the Rising Stars Program. He has volunteered at events like B’ball for All, a basketball clinic for children in the autism spectrum, and Maze Day, an annual event hosted by the Department of Computer Science for visually impaired children. He is a member of the fencing team at UNC.

Even before Jake arrived in Chapel Hill from his home in St. Louis, Missouri, he stood out among his peers.

At 15 years old, Bernstein and his sister Simone, two years his elder, founded VolunTEEN Nation, an organization that encourages teenagers and young adults to be active in community service. He says that he was driven to found a non-profit helping middle and high school students find community service endeavors after he was turned away from opportunities that required a minimum age of 18.

At 16, he and his sister were named to Forbes Magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30” social entrepreneurs list.

“With VolunTEEN and with different projects I’ve done,” Bernstein says, “I’ve always been interested in helping kids on the autism spectrum and with other disabilities because of the friends and neighbors I had growing up. Seeing just how few opportunities there were for them to engage in things like sports and computers was just incredible. They had so few of the opportunities that everyone else had.”

At UNC, Bernstein was immediately drawn in by the opportunities provided by computer science as well as the unique learning environment. He has co-founded Communigift, an online giving platform that offers donors a convenient and meaningful way to give and serves as a software tool for organizations participating in Adopt-a-Family and product-based donation programs. He spent this past summer in San Francisco working with a tech start-up called PayNearMe as part of the True Entrepreneur Corps program, where he was able to combine his social entrepreneurship experience with the coding skills he has developed at UNC.

Bernstein encourages his fellow students to take advantage of available resources, recalling that it was much easier to start Communigift than VolunTEEN Nation. He also urges his peers working on behalf of non-profit organizations or UNC-Chapel Hill student groups to take advantage of pro bono resources offered uniquely to those with non-profit status.

“Working at Carolina,” he says, “I’m working with three of the most brilliant people I know. You have not only a network of professors and resources, but you have an incredible amount of students to work alongside you.”

“There was a Friday class last year called Tools of the Trade that I went to several times, and those classes were extremely helpful in my job. I would encourage anyone to take a class like that to help prepare themselves for the workforce because there are a lot of different things that you don’t see in your CS classes that you use in the workforce.”

As for the future, Bernstein is eager to combine the hard and soft skills learned in class with another summer’s worth of valuable experience. He also looks forward to the new challenges that have accompanied the launch of Communigift in November 2014 and the growth of VolunTEEN Nation under new management.

“VolunTEEN is being led by a lot of ambassadors who’ve done a great job. I’m happy to say that it has continued to succeed since I’ve come to college. Communigift is going full speed ahead. Look out for it as we launch and try to get as many families adopted as possible. We’re looking at partnering with several organizations in North Carolina as well as in California and a few other places throughout the country, so I couldn’t be more excited about that.”