Priorities:University of British Columbia Student Priorities

Overview

Learn more: University of British Columbia

Spring 2017 UIF Pitch: https://youtu.be/5o6awqCfMko

Strategy #1:

Multidisciplinary New Venture Design Workshop

To foster connections and team building between students in all faculties with a purpose to create a commercialize product, a community initiative or non-profit organization.

Current entrepreneurship courses that are elective options for non-commerce faculties require students to chose to pursue them and put in a lot of work.

Our findings indicate that students are typically looking for lighter workloads and more fun in courses that they choose for their electives. With this in mind, we wish to create a new venture design workshop which will teach important skill such as design-centric thinking, leadership, brainstorming and business basics.

The existing new venture design course is only open to commerce and engineering students. We would also like to see this open to students in all faculties.

Strategy #2:

UB(Seeds) Capital Fundraising Event

There are many resources on campus provided by entreprenurship@UBC to enable new ventures to connect with mentorship and potential customers, however, access to capital is sparse as the requirements to access the UBC Seed Fund are stringent.

Through our proposed UB(Seeds) event we hope to provide budding entrepreneurs with validation and the capital needed to startup. The event's objective is to gather at least 200 entrepreneurial-minded students and faculty members in one room to either pitch and/or evaluate ideas presented by other members of the University of British Columbia community.

Strategy #3

Make course evaluations more impactful.

We've found that course evaluations are typically not mandatory for students to complete and are prone to response bias if students have "extreme", negative or positive, feedback.

Currently, the Sauder School of Business (Faculty of Commerce) has these evaluations as mandatory requirements for all students at the end of the term, with a mid-term optional evaluation that is completed in class with the assistance of a peer class liason.

Our goal is to bring the Sauder School method to all faculties in order to provide school administration with a better understanding of their instructors. We also plan to work with applicable administrative and technical partners in order to aggregate this data for student use.

Strategy #4

Connect Students from Day One

Current Imagine Day (first day) proceedings require students to attend faculty-specific orientation and rallies. At the end of Imagine Day, each faculty is seated separately in the large Thunderbird Stadium without any inter-faculty interaction.

We hope to see organized events that aim to connect students from many different faculties in order to provide and exciting and inclusive environment (values that UBC certainly strives for) from the student's very first day on campus.