For one Tufts junior, interning at an alum’s startup has meant finding a mentor who’s shaped his views on entrepreneurship and data-driven problem solving
Ronan Hwang, E27 (left), with Ganance co-founders Alex Ocampo, A14, and Tyler Nolan. Of his Ganance internship, Hwang says, "Alex gave me the freedom to work on something on my own while also giving me guidance. I feel like I could grow in so many directions.”
One summer weekend before his junior year at Tufts, Ronan Hwang flew from Boston to Chicago and finally met in person the colleagues he had been working with for weeks. The team, members of the startup firm Ganance, had gathered to test a new product and prepare their first shipment: a slim disk that can turn almost any watch into a smart watch. Hwang had helped build the device from afar.
“I loved the work I’d been doing remotely,” says Hwang, E27, a data science major. “But I didn’t realize how important actually being in Chicago would be. Just being around Alex and the team, watching how things worked—I learned a lot from that.”
Alex is Alex Ocampo, A14, co-founder of Ganance, who had been mentoring Hwang throughout the summer. “Remote internships are always tricky to make interesting and meaningful,” says Ocampo, a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Tufts’ Derby Entrepreneurship Center. “I wanted Ronan to see what it feels like when we’re all in one place, getting our hands dirty, having lunch together, celebrating what we’re building.”
Hwang’s path to Ganance had begun months earlier, when Ocampo, as a guest-lecturer for Hwang’s Entrepreneurship and Business Planning course, presented on his work in wearable technology. At the time, Hwang wasn’t looking for an internship. But later, when Hwang did begin searching for summer opportunities, he reached out to Ocampo.
What started as an informational interview turned into an opportunity. “Alex gave me a couple other ideas,” Hwang recalls. “And then he said, ‘You could come work with us if you want.’”
Eventually, that opportunity became a solid mentor/mentee relationship, one that shaped Hwang’s ideas about work and his future career. For Ocampo, the decision to work with Hwang reflected a principle informed by his own career. “In my journey, I always had people make time for me,” he says. “So if a student reaches out thinking I can help or support them in some way, I’ll make time.”
Learning How to Work
With an internship grant from the Derby Entrepreneurship Center, Hwang joined Ganance as a software engineering intern and began working on the core technical problem in front of the company: teaching the system to recognize different physical activities from watch-based sensor data—that is, determining whether a user was walking, driving, biking, scootering, or resting.
Much of the work sat outside anything he had done before; as he puts it, “some of the stuff I was working on, I’d never touched in my life. It was a pretty steep learning curve.” But the summer’s most lasting lessons, Hwang says, went beyond the technical. They came from working so closely with Ocampo, seeing day to day how his mentor approached problems, responsibility, and people.
“If mentorship works, it doesn’t end when the internship ends. I always tell my interns, ‘I’m in your corner from here on out.’”
“Watching Alex, I learned that at a startup, or working as an entrepreneur, nobody’s really holding you accountable,” Hwang says. “You have to own the work.” Hwang felt the responsibility of having to structure his own time, track his own progress, and speak up when he got stuck. “I learned how to push myself,” he says, “and how to ask for help when I needed it.”
He also came to understand parts of professional life he hadn’t anticipated. “I saw that Alex was always talking to people and trying to create opportunities,” Hwang says. “I hadn’t fully understood the importance of networking before this internship. Alex modeled that for me and also talked with me about ways to go about it.”
Taken together, the lessons—about ownership, initiative, and how opportunities are made—began to change how Hwang saw himself, and what he imagined he could step into next.
“I gained a lot of confidence from doing this work. If I want to go into health tech, I can say, ‘I’ve done this before,’” Hwang says. “But beyond that, Alex gave me the freedom to work on something on my own while also giving me guidance. I feel like I could grow in so many directions.”
A Mentor Shaped by Mentors
Ocampo’s approach to mentoring, he says, is rooted in his own early career. “I’ve had very supportive people in my life. Mentors helped me get out of my own way.”
Now that he’s in a position to be a mentor himself, he aims to help others get out of their own way—that is, to tackle challenges independently, with support when needed, and, he says, with explicit expectations. “I tell you the goal and then I give you a project knowing you don’t know how to do it,” he says. “That’s not a flaw. That’s the internship.”
He is conscious of the fact that early internships often shape how students understand work in general. “The first experiences you have create your impression of what work is,” he says. “So I try to show that, yes, we set goals and get things done—but we also talk, we laugh, we build relationships.”
That philosophy carried into the Chicago weekend, which Ocampo saw as more than a product milestone. “It was a chance to create a memorable experience in person, and to show Ronan what being part of a successful work team can feel like,” he says.
Since the summer ended, Hwang and Ocampo have stayed in touch, trading messages and updates. Ocampo believes the ongoing connection is the point. “If mentorship works,” he says, “it doesn’t end when the internship ends. I always tell my interns, ‘I’m in your corner from here on out.’”
