It’s historically been for ages 7 – 17, though we never stopped anyone seeking knowledge and inspiration at AlligatorZone events. However, we learned that lately, many undergraduate students are seeking inspiration and pointers for future careers beyond what their college career counseling facilities offer.
We regularly seek advice from some of the younger AlligatorZone ambassadors of previous events who have been following us for the past decade or more from when they were in middle school but are now undergraduate students. We also informally polled students in outfits that run robotic camps for high schoolers. When this idea was proposed previously, it was shot down because teens in high schools assumed that AlligatorZone was not for them.
The farthest we got to being embraced by teenagers in high school is evidenced by an article on Page 2 of the February 2022 issue of Smoke Signal, the high school newspaper of Mission San Jose High School.
There was also high school freshman Ananya who led the charge on speaking about an AlligatorZone event in Foster City, CA at the City Council in 2019.
We are testing the waters with a small number of seats carved out for undergrads in a new category of tickets labeled as ‘College Kids’ when you book tickets for the upcoming AlligatorZone event featuring startups on 9/21 at Computer History Museum. AI startups Cactus (oncactus.com), C-Infinity (c-infinity.ai) and Navier (navierboat.com) will be presented by their respective founders.
Tell us what we can do to further improve AlligatorZone. We do not know if and how much such a forum will be useful to college undergraduate students, but we feel optimistic that this will widen the positive impact that AlligatorZone has been making for families and entrepreneurs across multiple communities for more than a decade.
