Posted: April 17, 2016, 4:17pm
Last Wednesday, my FlexSpecs team competed in the final round of the Min Family Engineering Social Entrepreneurship Challenge. Held in the boardroom on the 5th floor of the Ronald Tutor Hall building, this session was for the engineering deans, students from the Iovine and Young Academy, and the three judges – Brian Chossek, Julie Pantiskas, and Dr. Kenneth Pickar. Mr. Chossek specializes in mission-based enterprises and business incubation. Mrs. Pantiskas evaluated us more on the business side, having held executive positions at Deloitte, Walt Disney Company, and various start-ups. The last judge, Dr. Pickar is a Visiting Professor of Mechanical and Medical Engineering at Caltech.
All the teams had 7 minutes to present their pitch, and approximately 6 minutes for questions and answers. The other groups – MedZango, OptDx, and Drops – went before our team. Because we practiced our pitch for approximately 7-8 hours in total, we perfectly hit the time limit and delivered. After half an hour of deliberations, the judges announced FlexSpecs and OptDx as the final two! We will know who the 1stplace winner is this coming Wednesday at the Viterbi Awards at the Beverly Wilshire. Keeping our fingers crossed!!
Published on July 27th, 2017
Last updated on August 10th, 2017