Aug 17

Aug 17 The End Of A Great Summer of Work

This summer was busier and more rewarding than I ever imagined it would be. The hours spent teaching, mentoring and managing the Wheaton Innovates (WiN) Team of students challenged my mind and filled my heart.

If you’ve been following along with my weekly posts, thanks for reading. If not, to catch you up I was given the reigns of the partnership between Wheaton College and MassChallenge. The ask was to choose a group of student and turn them into a successful consulting team that would work with some of the most promising new startups in New England.

We spent several weeks in the classroom learning the basics. I already know that there were some lessons I didn’t teach and must be part of the curriculum in the future. The time on site at MassChallenge was inspiring and full of meetings, laughs, and excellent work.

In the end, we had 31 different companies request our services and projects completed for 17 of them. Our work included developing marketing strategy plans, producing videos, taking headshots, creating social media content and developing a website.

Not bad for a brand new team over six weeks is it?

For some of the students, this was their first work experience. Many of them were working with technology and on projects that they had never thought of doing before. It was fun to watch them choose to shadow on projects where they didn’t yet feel comfortable to contribute but wanting to learn.

They learned how you never know during a requirements gathering meeting if the client is going to be a joy or difficult to work with and that no matter how cool a project sounds if a client can’t get the logistics worked out on their side it doesn’t happen.

Thank you to everyone at MassChallenge for making us feel welcomed and to the startups who we will be rooting for even now that our work together is complete.

I’ve not mentioned the team members by name up until now because I wanted to wait until the end of our time together to share more about them. If you are looking to hire the next great junior member of your team, you should click through and hire one of these marvelous students.

Angel Bird, Alex Stomberg, Jules Bibonimana, Zhuo Chen, Alvaro Guerra Rodriguez, Christina Smith and Keegan Dougless are all going to do amazing things in this world and whoever is smart enough to hire them is going to be happy they did.