Category Archives: Event Recaps

Students Learn About Startup Life from Alums at New Event

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On Monday, November 9, the Honors Business Association held Start-Up Speed Dating, the first-ever event of this kind for BHP students interested in entrepreneurship. Approximately 30 students were able to meet with six prominent BHP alumni (listed below), all of whom found success in the startup space:

  • Travis Devitt (BHP/FIN ‘06) – current Director of Growth at Aceable and Angel Investor
  • Michael Koetting (BHP/MIS ‘13) – current Corporate Development Manager at Civitas Learning and Co-Founder of Hoot.me
  • Cindy Lo (BHP/MIS ‘98) – President/Owner/Event Strategist at Red Velvet Events, an international award-winning meeting and events management company
  • Elliot Oshman (BHP/MIS ‘00) – current Principal Program Manager at Amazon and former Director of Client Operations/Senior Technical Advisor/Senior Manager for Delivery Operations at Mass Relevance (now Spredfast)
  • Haley Robison (BHP/FIN ‘07) – current COO of the innovative outdoor equipment brand KAMMOK, MBA/MA in Education graduate from Stanford University, former curriculum designer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and former consultant at Bain & Company
  • Joel Knight (BHP/MIS ‘02) – Vice President of Customer Experience at WP Engine; formerly worked for several early-stage startups including Bazaarvoice, BlackLocus, and Compare Metrics

Rotating through small groups of 5-6 students each, the alumni provided valuable insights about their entrepreneurial experiences and shared the lessons they learned during their careers so far.

Interested in entrepreneurship but couldn’t attend this year’s Start-Up Speed Dating? Check out the below major takeaways that students learned from the event:

  1. Optimize for opportunity. Travis Devitt, who joined a startup after working in hedge funds for eight years, advised students to look beyond perks or salaries and choose jobs that give us the greatest opportunities for growth and advancement. Often these opportunities can come at startups, where employees are given a lot of responsibility and are continually challenged to help the company grow.
  2. Entrepreneurship has no GPA. Michael Koetting put it this way: if you go into your test tomorrow and absolutely bomb it, that grade will stay with you in some form or fashion for the rest of your college career. The impact of failure on your GPA is somewhat irreversible, but the same isn’t true for entrepreneurship. Failures don’t put a stain on a resume, provided you learn from them. In fact, they can often be good things. So when it happens, pick yourself up and move on.
  3. Get plugged in to the Austin startup scene. Austin provides a plethora of events for budding entrepreneurs, and these events are a great way to meet other people in the startup scene. A subscription to Austin Startup Digest will help you learn about these types of events. Once you’re there, network, learn from other entrepreneurs, and find out about some of the most innovative ideas coming out of Austin.
  4. Do what scares you – but don’t make decisions out of fear. Haley Robison told students that she took her current job at a startup because it was the one job that scared her the most. She said she knew that she would be challenged, that she was passionate about the idea, and that it would help her grow. However, she also said that fear shouldn’t rule your decision-making process. Don’t do something because you’re afraid of what will happen if you do something else. Do it because you want to.
  5. Act on your idea now. If you have an idea and you think it’s worth pursuing, start testing it out now. See if you can get people to listen to you, and try to gauge their response. When building a team, make sure you get people who really believe in what you’re doing. If you can’t get a couple of friends who are passionate about working with your idea, chances are you’ll have a hard time convincing investors to invest in your company.

After a successful first event, HBA looks forward to continuing its partnership with BHP alumni, exposing students to the wide variety of career options available to them through BHP.

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BHP Team Takes First Place at Eller Ethics Case Competition

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2015EllerThe Eller School of Management hosted its 13th annual Collegiate Ethics Case Competition this past week at the University of Arizona. Thirty-three teams, hailing from Mexico to Canada, offered solutions to the case, which focused on Uber. BHP seniors Rachel Huynh and George Chidiac, delivered business, legal, and ethical recommendations for the global giant – and came home with a victory.

What character defines Uber? How should Uber operate in volatile legal environments? How can Uber improve its business model to survive… and thrive? These questions guided Rachel and George as they argued Uber is able to become an ethical company. More importantly, with the help of philosophy, business law, and pragmatism, the two argued it is necessary for Uber to be ethical.

“This year’s case topic on the ethics of Uber brought a novel challenge to George and I because we had never done a case specifically focused on ethics before;” said Rachel.

“In many of our other cases, rigorous modeling and financials often took center stage over qualitative analyses. Since this case was purely qualitative in its nature, it was an incredible way to take a step back from a hyper-focus on the bottom line and instead deep dive into what we believe it means to be a business in our society. We found ourselves debating ideas and referencing texts from our philosophy, government, and LEB classes to answer these difficult questions.”

The two-day competition poised a unique format: round one was one twenty minute presentation followed by a five minute Q&A, and round two was a 12 minute firing round of questions from the judges. The top teams advanced from five brackets. In the final round, after a shorter 10 minute presentation, one question set apart the top 5 teams: “Is Uber an ethical company?” No better question epitomized the focus of the competition, reminding us businesses are made of people, by people, and for people.

Rachel said the case left them pondering deeper questions about their careers and how they can personally shape their organizations or companies as agents of society. “It’s not enough just to do well; you have to do good too,” she said. “As George and I made the trek back to Austin, we read a Southwest Airlines sign: ‘Without heart, a business is just a machine.’ We couldn’t agree more.”

You can view George and Rachel’s presentation in the final round of the competition here.

Students Mingle with Companies at Annual HBA Event

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Students Mingle with Companies at Annual HBA Event

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The Honors Business Association held its annual Company Dinner on Wednesday, October 14th. Approximately 120 guests spent their evening at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center enjoying a delicious three-course meal and developing new professional connections.

BHP students of all majors and classifications had the opportunity to network with eight companies representing a variety of industries:

  • Sense Corp
  • Dell
  • H-E-B
  • PepsiCo
  • BP
  • EY
  • PwC
  • Accenture

At each table, students engaged in meaningful discussions with company representatives. Students learned about the representatives’ professional experiences and gained new insights about making the transition from college to the workplace. Company representatives, some of whom were BHP alumni, shared stories about their career paths and the skills they gained from college that have helped them in their work.

The 2015 Company Dinner was a great success, continuing to serve as one of the most popular ways for BHP students to build their professional network.

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Freshman Leadership Kickoff Top 10

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Freshman Leadership Kickoff Top 10

LK 2015 Group Photo

Written by Michelle Zhang

If you were to walk past the McCombs Family Statue at 9 a.m. last Saturday, you would have seen 140 BHP freshmen, faculty, and student leaders getting ready to board three charter buses to the John Newcombe Tennis Ranch in New Braunfels. The event: the annual BHP Leadership Kickoff – a jam-packed 28 hours of outdoor activities, formal convocation, and comprehensive introduction for freshmen to the world of the UT Business Honors Program.

This year, I was lucky enough to have been able to plan Leadership Kickoff with my fantastic and fearless co-chair Kate Shanks. Although the weekend was filled with an abundance of exciting moments, here are the top 10 things we’ll remember from BHP Leadership Kickoff 2015.

  1. How helpful our student leaders were

With 12 peer mentors, eight HBA Executive Board members, and two Ethics Board chair (with overlap between PM and Exec and Ethics Board – wow, BHP students really do do everything!), we had a great deal of student help this year. Student leaders led groups in the many activities throughout the weekend, commanded attention at the appropriate times, assisted at morning check-in, and so much more without complaining for one second. You’re the real MVP’s, student leaders.

  1. The thrill on students’ faces during the high ropes

Part of Saturday’s afternoon activities was the high ropes course, which ranged from a 450 foot zip line to partner rope challenges to the terrifying Screamer. Whether or not students chose to take a Leap of Faith (a climb and jump off a wooden pole to reach a suspended rung several hundred feet off the ground) or watch their peers instead, we loved seeing the enthusiasm for action and adventure.

  1. Teams bonds being formed through the low ropes

On the flip side of the exciting high ropes, the low ropes course allowed for peer mentor groups to collaborate on team-building exercises such as the Spiderweb. In this activity, teams had to work together to make it through a “web” without touching the rope. However, each team member had to make it through a different section of the web, making for a challenging strategic and trust-forming exercise.

  1. Everyone dressed in business casual singing The Eyes of Texas

What is there to explain except that everyone looked great in their ironed shirts and shiny shoes? These freshmen are going to fit right in at McCombs.

  1. Peer mentor group chants at BHPlayoffs

If we were to explain BHPlayoffs, we’d say that it’s a culmination of all the team-bonding of the low ropes + action of the high ropes + natural competitive nature of BHP students into a two-hour face-off between all the peer mentor groups. The first activity of the night was peer mentor group chants, which elicited a conglomeration of huddles, carefully crafted disses, and even some choreographed dance moves from the talented teams. We event witnessed a student doing a backflip over another student.

  1. How hyped up everyone got during the Rock Paper Scissors tournament

Seriously, just look at this picture.

LK 2015 RPS

  1. Two words: Orange Hug

If you’ve never played this game, you basically have to pass an orange down a line of people using your neck. There are two reasons we chose to use this game: 1. you get to know your teammates very well, and 2. the priceless photos.

  1. Going through all the Scavenger Hunt photos

To spice things up this year, we added a photo scavenger hunt led by 18 student leaders in randomized groups. Some criteria items included spelling out BHP with their bodies, getting the farthest away from the starting point (one group made it all the way to the New Braunfels Fire Station – two miles away), and recreating Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

  1. Working with Tisha

Even with a lot on her plate already (namely, carrying twins!), our amazing advisor Tisha was with us every step of the way. She kept a comfortable distance so that we could set our own goals and accomplish our own tasks, but supported us with any resources we needed. Thank you, Tisha! You rock.

  1. Seeing it all come together at the end

Special thanks to BHP academic advisors Tisha Monsey, Paul Pritchett, and BHP career advisor Greta Fenley, for their help this past weekend. We couldn’t have done it without you!

LK 2015

HBA Hosts Successful Incredible Race for McCombs Students

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HBA Hosts Successful Incredible Race for McCombs Students

2015 Incredible Race

This past Sunday, the Honors Business Association held its third annual Incredible Race event, open to all McCombs students.  Organized by the External Affairs committee, this event is an effort for HBA to both connect with other McCombs organizations while also giving back to the Austin community.

In the race, teams of two were given cryptic clues to find the location of eight stations hidden around UT. Once they found the location of a station, they had to complete the station’s challenge to gain access to another clue. The first three teams to find all eight stations and complete the eight challenges were declared the winners.

This year, HBA chose to donate all event proceeds to the Micah 6 Food Pantry, a food bank for the homeless and impoverished located right next to the UT campus. HBA has been consistently volunteering at the pantry for several years, so this year’s Incredible Race became an opportunity to contribute financially to an organization to which HBA has gotten quite close.  HBA raised approximately $150 for the pantry.

This event is also HBA’s avenue to connect with other McCombs student organizations, as HBA traditionally partners with another McCombs organization to plan the race. This year, in an effort to grow HBA’s presence in the McCombs community, HBA worked with five McCombs organizations (a record-breaking number) to organize the event. These organizations are:

  • Asian Business Students Association
  • Black Business Students Association
  • Delta Sigma Pi
  • Hispanic Business Students Association
  • University Securities Investment Team

All in all, this year’s Incredible Race was a great success. Despite the fact that this event only started two years ago, it has grown tremendously. Hopes are high that it continues to grow and make an even bigger impact in the McCombs and Austin communities.

A huge thank you to the volunteers from all of the organizations that participated, and all of the participants who made this event a success!

2015 Incredible Race 2