Three Cornell computer science undergraduates will spend this summer as paid interns with Silicon Valley startup companies, helping to solve technical problems and receiving a crash course in entrepreneurship.

Juniors Maggie Bi, Feiran Chen and Antoine Pourchet are among a small group selected from 2,500 applicants from several schools for a prestigious fellowship sponsored by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KCPB), a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.

“Our goal is to help our entrepreneurs,” said Andy Chen, a KCPB partner who specializes in recruitment. “They have always told us that the money is not what matters. We get them access to the best talents.” The small companies KCPB finances don’t have the resources to reach out to students, he explained. “They have no brand, but they have amazing problems to solve,” he said. At the same time, he noted, East Coast students have a harder time connecting with opportunities out west.

After being accepted as candidates, KCPB fellows choose companies with which they would like to work and conduct interviews with those companies to finalize offers and negotiate compensation.

Bi, who is interested in the intersection of design and computer science, will be joining the Web team of the news aggregating company Flipboard. “Their interface design is absolutely beautiful, and I can’t wait to make my contributions to its full realization on the Web,” she said. And she looks forward to “all the bright people” she will meet.

Chen will work with Coursera, which offers university courses for free as massive open online courses (MOOCs). The company has, she said, “a huge potential and a cause I believe in.” She expects to be working on a product team and looks forward to improving her coding skills and product intuition. A native of China, Chen spent last summer interning at Google.

Pourchet will work at Square, a company that processes credit card payments through small swiping devices attached to a phone or tablet. He hopes to work with their security team. ”I like to work in the back end, making systems better and more secure for everyone,” he said.

Outside of working hours the fellows also will attend events sponsored by KCPB featuring leaders of major technology companies, and will meet with their counterparts from other schools. “By the end of the summer they will know what it’s like to start a company, to get it funded and to run it,” Andy Chen said.