On Thursday, Feb. 8, the Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement cohort invited the Nomad Futurist Foundation to give a hybrid seminar in room S-54 and on Zoom about the growing digital industry of data centers.
Yvette Campbell, the MESA director at De Anza College, organized the workshop and aims to hold more similar events.
“This is just one of many events that we’re going to have this year, where we’re bringing industry partners to our students,” Campbell said.
Nomad brought in a panel of industry experts with different professional backgrounds, ranging from medical to telecommunications.
Phillip Koblence, a Managing Director and Co-Founder at the foundation, directed the Zoom program where he introduced De Anza students to the panel and his company.
“We founded the (Nomad Futurist) foundation to (introduce people to the digital industry) that don’t otherwise know about our industry, even though they use it,” Koblence said.
Koblence mentioned that before the internet, things were a lot more static so building this industry – to store the online data that people create via text message, email, or TikTok – requires data centers. He said that these centers have been rapidly growing and expanding for some time now.
Anahita Mouro, a Senior Program Manager at Google, has seen an “astronomical explosion of growth within a short span of time” with data centers.
“It has been a very fascinating journey into the digital infrastructure and seeing how every time you think we have doubled or tripled what we have built,” Mouro said. “When a few years later, you will be surprised that that was nothing. Just got to do it again, many times bigger and larger.”
“This industry needs diverse voices and talent to displace a lot of the folks that have been here since the beginning of the industry,” Koblence said.
Rosa Jahankhah, 21, an applied mathematics and computer science major, said she attended this workshop to learn more about the data center industry.
Jahankhah moved to California from Iran and she plans to either become a data scientist or to work in a machine learning job that works with AI. She said she came to this workshop to get more information on how to get jobs in the data science field and how to pass interviews.
Indigo Pinto, a Senior Project Manager at Constructiv with a background in medical devices, recommends getting an internship since they are “the best way to get in the door and give you the full experience.”
John Bonczek is a chief revenue officer at Fifteenfortyseven Critical Systems Realty with a background in telecommunications, who operates eight properties in the data center industry.
“This (digital) industry is future proof and protected from AI and being replaced by AI,” Bonczek said. “I can’t imagine a world where it is not going to continue to be critical in everything that we do from calls like this (on Zoom) to our streaming movies and entertainment, to our home banking and the whole financial flow through a digital infrastructure.”
