First off, it is an event called Southeastern Regional Meetup by the University Innovation Fellows organization. The event carried an experiment in which random students from two universities in the South - Furman University and Clemson University - took a challenge of redesigning downtown eating experience for downtown diners.
We were super excited for the event since Greenville city has been known for, besides its tranquil and healthily social environment, its so-called "Foodie paradise" reputation by both the locals and the visitors.
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| Greenville downtown - Nightly peace |
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| The Lazy Goat - look at such a beautiful view it has! |
Basically, we teamed up and interviewed downtown people about their experience eating at downtown restaurants such as Gringos, The Lazy Goat, and Trappe Door. Then we drew out conclusions about remaining problems and picked one that we wanted to fix.
My group decided on solutions to the slow, distractive service in the restaurants and invented some cool technological improvements to quickly notify the waiters to achieve prompt service. Guess what those were? They are iPads with at-door ordering options, waiter choice (with age, gender, characteristics indicated), and sensors on chairs and dishes!
The awesome thing was that after the event, we students realized our abilities to improve the community simply by such small things. We overcame the barriers of acknowledging that we were still college students and, all of the sudden, felt reinforced to work on our ideas and talked to people who could turn them into matters.
Yes! Southeastern Regional Meetup implanted entrepreneurial spirit into our youthful and energetic mind.
Plus, I expanded my network with people all over the US, especially regional students and the UI Fellows. One of my favorite friends there is Rick Ferreira.
We stayed in touch with each other since then by going to several events downtown together. The first one was his presentation about his internship at NASA last summer. It was held in Earth Fare by the Piedmont Humanists - a subgroup of the American Humanist Association in the Upstate South Carolina. I met some new friends, including Joe Melcardo the host of the AHA and one freshman at Furman named CJ Lane. After the meeting, we all became good friends: CJ always gives me an affectionate hug when he sees me on campus!
Also, we went to a talk about personal narratives by Jeremy Boeh - director of the Launch program at Wofford College in cultivating entrepreneurship among college students - at Beer & Napkins. The talk was about tactics on personal branding in business, especially in the start-up phase. During the talk, we learned to think of the stories in our life that matter, comfortably share with others, and come up with our own strengths and weaknesses that would go along with our entrepreneurial spirit.
That to say, if you intend to go for FU, you definitely don't want to miss tremendous opportunities that Greenville downtown offers for the locals and for Furman students!
My group decided on solutions to the slow, distractive service in the restaurants and invented some cool technological improvements to quickly notify the waiters to achieve prompt service. Guess what those were? They are iPads with at-door ordering options, waiter choice (with age, gender, characteristics indicated), and sensors on chairs and dishes!
The awesome thing was that after the event, we students realized our abilities to improve the community simply by such small things. We overcame the barriers of acknowledging that we were still college students and, all of the sudden, felt reinforced to work on our ideas and talked to people who could turn them into matters.
Yes! Southeastern Regional Meetup implanted entrepreneurial spirit into our youthful and energetic mind.
Plus, I expanded my network with people all over the US, especially regional students and the UI Fellows. One of my favorite friends there is Rick Ferreira.
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| Rick and me at the SMR event - goodbye time |
We stayed in touch with each other since then by going to several events downtown together. The first one was his presentation about his internship at NASA last summer. It was held in Earth Fare by the Piedmont Humanists - a subgroup of the American Humanist Association in the Upstate South Carolina. I met some new friends, including Joe Melcardo the host of the AHA and one freshman at Furman named CJ Lane. After the meeting, we all became good friends: CJ always gives me an affectionate hug when he sees me on campus!
Also, we went to a talk about personal narratives by Jeremy Boeh - director of the Launch program at Wofford College in cultivating entrepreneurship among college students - at Beer & Napkins. The talk was about tactics on personal branding in business, especially in the start-up phase. During the talk, we learned to think of the stories in our life that matter, comfortably share with others, and come up with our own strengths and weaknesses that would go along with our entrepreneurial spirit.
That to say, if you intend to go for FU, you definitely don't want to miss tremendous opportunities that Greenville downtown offers for the locals and for Furman students!
