Meet the NYC Venture Capital Internship Alumni: Shasuna Lin

My name is Shasuna, and I’m a recent Hunter College graduate with a degree in media studies and a background in UI/UX and design. This summer, I was selected to join the NYC Venture Capital Internship Program, where I had the chance to intern at two different funds: FullCircle Fund and Isogon Ventures.

I’ve always sat somewhere between creativity and technology. Most of my work has lived in design, thinking about how people move through an interface, what makes something feel intuitive, how a product “says” what it is before anyone reads a word of it. Alongside that, I’ve been really interested in AI and in what technology brings to every discipline it touches. Design, media, education, hiring. None of it stays untouched for long, and that’s the part I find exciting.

What pulled me toward venture capital was the exposure. VCs get a front row seat to a huge range of ideas and work with founders from every industry you can think of. You’re not stuck in one sector or one way of thinking. You’re constantly running into new problems and having to get up to speed fast. That felt like a natural extension of how I already think, even if the vocabulary was completely new to me.

And it was new. I came in with almost no background in venture capital or finance. But the week-long bootcamp changed that quickly. Partners from NYC-based firms walked us through how the industry actually works: sourcing, diligence, how funds are structured, how decisions get made. We also heard from lawyers and from people working in AI, which grounded a lot of the abstract stuff in real practice. By the end of that week I had a working vocabulary and a real foundation to build on.

My work at FullCircle Fund was mostly research into niche corners of the landscape: market mapping across verticals, pressure-testing companies against their competitive set, figuring out where a thesis holds up and where it doesn’t. I also got a real look at how a fund runs day to day, from deal sourcing to market analysis to building AI automations to speed parts of that up. At Isogon Ventures I went deeper into AI, not just as an investment category but as something that changes how work actually gets done. Coming from a design background, that part felt familiar in an unexpected way. Thinking about AI integration is really just thinking about workflow and interface, applied to a new context.

Getting to work with two funds was the most valuable part of the summer. Seeing two different theses up close, two perspectives on what’s worth backing and why, gave me a much fuller picture than one alone would have. The range of industries and problems you end up learning about is genuinely enormous.

What I took away most is confidence in my ability to learn something totally unfamiliar and make myself useful in it. I didn’t show up with the vocabulary or the frameworks. I built them week by week, mostly by asking a lot of questions and being willing to not know things out loud.

If I could give advice to another student thinking about applying: you don’t need a finance background to belong here. You need curiosity and the willingness to sit in the discomfort while you catch up.

Being part of the NYC VC Program opened doors I didn’t expect and introduced me to so many wonderful people. It gave me a clearer sense of the kind of work I want to do, and I’m excited about where it leads next.