Maryland native Daniel Miyares has always had his heart set on the south. When he visited UT as a high school student, he fell in love with Austin’s great people, fun activities, and pleasant weather. He applied to BHP not knowing the magnitude of opportunities, benefits, and connections it has to offer. Once he began his freshman year, he quickly realized BHP was “pretty spectacular in terms of, not only the rankings, but the opportunities BHP provides on campus and post graduation.” He is a BHP and MIS major and will graduate in May 2019.
Daniel came to UT knowing that he wanted to get involved in the start-up community and create his own business, but as he started to define his college experience, a passion for social entrepreneurship and social responsibility developed. He is currently interning at a social enterprise in Austin, Care2Rock. The company will soon be pitching to a start-up incubator, and he is helping them prepare. Care2Rock is a small office, with only two full-time employees, and is in the early stages of development. Care2Rock is launching an online music tutoring platform that will positively impact the foster care community nationwide. During the course of his internship, he has identified a referral program to help them grow and expand their customer acquisition efforts, assisted in optimizing their operations, and supported other business efforts.
Daniel also interned for ZeeMee, a venture-backed startup based in Mountain View, CA, which provides an online platform for students to express themselves in a social-media friendly, three-dimensional way throughout the college and job application processes. ZeeMee is currently partnered with more than 200 colleges, from the University of Oklahoma to Carnegie Mellon, to Morehouse, who allow students to submit their pages as part of their application. Daniel worked with their outreach and their operations teams, and spent most of the last school year coordinating their internship program. Daniel characterizes ZeeMee as “an ideal of a successful startup because of their mutual respect for each other, unrelenting drive, and fun-loving attitude.”
On campus, Daniel is heavily involved in the UT Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency. Daniel was also part of the Launchpad program, a branch of Freshmen Founders, last year as a freshman, and is now directing the program. The Launchpad program works with aspiring first-year students who are excited about entrepreneurship, but don’t know how to start. The Freshman Founders Program offers a semester long, immersive introduction to the UT and the Austin startup community. The program is a sequence of entrepreneurial seminars, workshops, and events meant to allow participants to network with the Austin startup community, and aimed at teaching them about on-campus resources available for student entrepreneurs. The organization also connects students with mentors. Daniel says he has been blown away by what students have done this year in the launch pad program.
Daniel attributes much of his success to the community of high-caliber students he has bonded with in BHP. “They are not only highly intelligent and have founded their own companies, but they have great personalities and we can share laughs.”