By Davis T. Joseph, member, Shoemaker Scholars program
On Wednesday, April 15, members of the Indiana University community will meet online for the virtual StartupIU Fair from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. EDT. The free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform; participants can join at https://bit.ly/startup-fair-iu.
Davis T. Joseph, a junior from Bloomington, Indiana, majors in informatics in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. He is in his second semester of the Shoemaker Scholars program.
The virtual StartupIU Fair was created by students, for students, and is overseen by the Shoemaker Scholars program. We are a group of students from across different schools committed to every student on campus who wants to be a part of the entrepreneurship and innovation community at Indiana University.
The event was created to re-engage IU’s startup and creatorship community and help foster development of independent student-led ideas, projects and businesses. Through this virtual fair, entrepreneurs and creators will be able to share current plans for their ventures, updates about what they are seeking to accomplish and how students can get involved. They will also learn how IU startups are dealing with changes due to COVID-19.
For students who want to get involved with a startup, this is a perfect opportunity to gain real-world experience separate from the classroom. Students who are thinking about starting their own venture or are in the early stages of doing so can learn a lot from the journeys undergone from several startups, including hearing about the ups and downs of starting a venture while being a student.
For my fellow startup leaders, this event is your opportunity to market yourself to the growing community and tap into the collective experiences of your peers to better improve your end services and/or products. This is an unprecedented opportunity to speak to students who want to do meaningful work for your startup or to recruit students to join your entrepreneurial pursuits — all in one place and at one time. These affordances put a responsibility on both startups and students to collaborate and rally themselves and their peers to do the best that IU students can do.
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