Young Tech Professionals (YTP) 2025 Recap

Young Tech Professionals (YTP) 2025 Recap

Spending hours pulling all-nighters in CS32 to build a Mario game felt like the peak of college accomplishment as a Computer Science major—until I joined Innovate@UCLA’s Young Tech Professionals (YTP) program in my freshman year in Spring 2023.

So, what is YTP?

The Young Tech Professionals bootcamp is a quarter-long program from Innovate@UCLA that helps students build professional skills while developing real, socially impactful products. Each team is matched with industry coaches, receives weekly guest lectures from leaders in tech, and works across design, development, and pitching. YTP was developed in 2018 by Davida Johnson, Executive Director, UCLA Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC) and is now taught as Engineering 170, a 4.0-unit course. Davida Johnson and Jim Davis, Professor, Engineering and Vice-Provost Emeritus, have teamed up as the class instructors.

It’s not just a class. It’s truly an incubator for mission-driven builders and doers.

A Class Unlike Any Other

Tasked with tackling sustainability, my team—ShelfMate—set out to do more than just build an app.

Our mission?

Empowering Pantries. Nourishing Communities. Making Every Trip Count.

It sounds polished now, but when we started, we were six students trying to build something meaningful. The “how” was TBD.

Then one teammate opened up about their experience with food insecurity—and suddenly, we realized it wasn’t uncommon. After digging deeper, we learned 13,000 UCLA students were food-insecure. That moment changed everything. Our project had a purpose.

We interviewed students, conducted surveys, and spoke to food pantries and donors. We quickly realized the problem wasn’t simple, and every feature we built needed to reflect real user needs.

Our app didn’t magically come together. There were messy moments, feature rewrites, pivots driven by user feedback, and plenty of “back to the whiteboard” energy. Watching ShelfMate evolve from a rough idea into an actual solution was one of the most rewarding parts of the whole experience.

Weekly Lessons, Real Growth
Every week, we picked up new tools and frameworks that shaped our process: design thinking, agile sprints, risk assessment, and even how to pivot when things just don’t work. By Demo Day, we had an MVP, a pitch, and the confidence to share our work with amazing Innovate board members, our coaches, and the greater UCLA tech community.

It felt like Shark Tank meets startup bootcamp, minus the scary valuations.

And while pitching was exhilarating, watching the other teams share bold, heartfelt solutions was equally inspiring.

Most classes I take are theory-based. This one? Exception to the rule.

You don’t just learn what agile is—you live it. No lectures about why “Waterfall fails” or abstract charts with no context. We understood Agile by watching it work in real time with our team. I still remember the session from Kevin Gray (CTO, Metrolink)—suddenly, project management clicked.

Then came Parag Gondhalekar (Chief AI Officer, InnerSights), who helped us think critically about how AI could actually create product value—not just be sprinkled in as a buzzword.

Thomas Phelps (CIO, Laserfiche) showed us real examples of biased AI outputs and the ethical costs of getting it wrong, I genuinely did a double take. As a daily GPT user, it was a wake-up call.

Why It Mattered
This built on everything I’d learned in projects like that Mario game—but now, we were designing for real-world impact.

These were real people. Real problems. Real solutions.

And that stuck with me so much that I came back to YTP in my junior year—as an AI advisor. I got to continue learning from industry lectures and help enable the next student cohort to bring their own ideas to life.

Whether you’re eyeing startups, PM, engineering, or research—YTP gives you the kind of cross-functional thinking, resilience, and real-world grounding no textbook can teach.

After going through this experience my freshman year, I knew I wanted to continue being involved with YTP community–the ambition to continuously grow and impact. I wanted to stay involved—not just to keep learning, but to give back to the community that shaped how I think about impact, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Thanks to Davida and the amazing
Innovate@UCLA team, I had the opportunity to return this year as an AI advisor for the 2025 cohort.

This time, my role was different. Instead of building a product, I was helping others build theirs—sitting through debugging sessions, exchanging ideas, and offering advice to teams navigating the same uncertainty I once did. It was a uniquely full-circle moment, and one of the most rewarding mentorship experiences I’ve had.

What surprised me most was how much I still learned from every lecture—especially from new instructors like Parag Gondhalekar, who brought a thoughtful AI perspective and is consulting with UCLA’s OARC on integrating applied AI into their researcher support and partnership model. The content had evolved to reflect how the tech landscape is shifting, and so had I. Each speaker left me with a different takeaway, whether it was rethinking AI integration, re-evaluating risk, or refining the human side of design.

Being part of the 2025 program reminded me that no matter your role—student or advisor—YTP is about constant learning, intentional building, and collective growth.

Spring 2025 Teams and Projects

A list of team names, members, coaches, and the issue they addressed can be found below.

Spring 2025 Guest Lecturers

We would like to thank all of our guest lecturers for taking the time to share your expertise:

Demo Day Judges
Students pitched their product to a group of four judges who evaluated teams on several factors: