June 16, 2016
UCLA computer science graduate student Brooke Wenig started her first week as a 2016 KPCB Engineering Fellow. The prestigious summer fellowship program, run by venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, pairs top students with leading Silicon Valley companies to develop technical skills, and network with leaders in their fields as well as other students in the program.
Wenig is a fellow at MyFitnessPal, an app that helps users track diet, exercise habits and reach fitness goals. The company, purchased last year by Under Armour, is based in San Francisco.
Wenig works in the company’s data science group and expects to focus on machine learning algorithms, coding in Spark, Python and Scala.
Wenig said she found out about the fellowship program through an announcement sent by the UCLA chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE), an honor society for computing and information sciences. The opportunities were appealing because of her entrepreneurial plans following graduation.
“I want to create my own start-up when I graduate, so I thought the fellowship would be a good way to gain connections with a well established VC firm and get exposed to startup culture,” said Wenig, who is on track to graduate with a master’s degree in 2017.
Wenig was vice president for UCLA ACM in 2015-16.
Photo courtesy Brooke Wenig