Sigma Eta Pi at USC

Program Development and Culture Building

Timeline: May 2021 - April 2022

Team: The Sigma Eta Pi at USC Executive Board

Role: President

A special thanks to: The entire organization for inspiring me and giving me a home away from home in Los Angeles.

When I came to USC, I wanted many different things—a community, a home, a way to learn more about the world, intellectual curiosity, friends to explore Los Angeles. But specifically, I wanted to learn about entrepreneurship and startups. I always knew I had a spark of entrepreneurial energy within me; I loved taking ideas and evolving them into systems for change. In fact, I believe that entrepreneurship is one of THE most powerful vehicles for change. Joining Sigma Eta Pi allowed me to find all of this.

The way SEP facilitates community has always fascinated me. When I first joined, I took part in their 10-week accelerator program where I got to develop a startup concept from ideation to implementation, and at the end of it, pitch it to a panel of investors. In collaboration with Laya, we pitched a tech social enterprise called Rally, a social media platform that allows users to directly connect with social issues and take action.

I didn’t stop there though. I wanted to be at the forefront and lead entrepreneurship initiatives not only in SEP, but across the USC entrepreneurship ecosystem. I wanted to inspire students to authentically pursue entrepreneurship as a potential career path, because as I mentioned previously, it truly can change lives. In May 2021, I took on the President role, where I led the strategic vision of the organization, grew on-campus presence, hosted collaborative social events, and helped even more students build awesome startups.

Culture is integral to community success. I’ll be writing here about some of the initiatives I facilitated to redefine how SEP approached community.

Recruitment Practices

People are the backbone of culture and community. They contribute ideas, build networks, and bring an energy that cannot be found anywhere else. That’s why recruitment sets the tone for culture building: it’s the selection process for the future of why and how we do what we do.

At SEP, I consider it like a 3-week sprint, starting off with involvement fairs to promote the organization, information sessions to give an overview of our mission, two rounds of interviews to test teamwork acumen and entrepreneurial potential, and a social mixer to ensure community fit. Our written application for candidacy tests motivational factors, digging deep into why an individual wants to join, and why entrepreneurship matters to them. It’s long and tedious—lots of room bookings, coordination, pitching, and presenting. But when we welcome a new cohort of bright-eyed individuals, it reminds us of why we do what we do.

I’m also the biggest proponent of instituting diversity and inclusion practices in communities. During my first year on the executive board, I proposed a new recruitment tactic: If a SEP member has a personal or professional affiliation with a candidate, they will not be allowed to speak on their behalf during deliberation. This ensures many things, but most importantly keeps the end-to-end recruitment process free of bias. In other words, the entire process is merit-based, and no candidate is at a disadvantage when applying.

Entrepreneurship should be accessible to all. No one should be barred from joining as long as they exhibit resiliency and spirit.

Marketing and Branding

Marketing works hand-in-hand with recruitment to attract top-tier talent and promote who we are. I consider Jasmine Liao to be my marketing partner-in-crime; a design whiz herself, she helped lead SEP through a gorgeous rebrand with the intergalactic space theme we now have today. This branding draws in a whimsical identity that looks to the unknown, representative of innovation.

The way that we express ourselves visually is conducive to how others see the organization—from the merchandise, to social media, to the flyers we hand out on Trousdale. Moreover, this consistency makes us instantly recognizable across digital and physical spaces.

A special thanks to design director Christina McBride for producing this video.

Founder’s Education

Incoming new members each semester get to always experience one of the most arguably rewarding experiences of SEP: Founder’s Education. Our Founder’s Education team is a collection of passionate students with experiences in venture, finance, and growth, all working to help other students learn how to scale their own startups.

I loved getting involved in facilitating this process; seeing others build with conviction and inspiration is incredibly heartwarming. When I took on the President role, I decided to re-evaluate the 10-week curriculum, inspecting where we could optimize the effectiveness of in-person lessons and workshops. After multiple iterations and redesigns of the curriculum, we set our sights on the following 10-week timeline:

• Week 1: Introduction to Entrepreneurship

  • An overview of the program and the fundamentals of entrepreneurship

• Week 2: Customer Discovery

  • A primer on how to engage and talk with potential customers and markets

• Week 3: Teams and the Business Model Canvas

  • How to effectively form teams and map out a business model

• Week 4: Identifying Problems

  • Lessons on how to pinpoint a specific problem to solve

• Week 5: Going from Problem to Solution

  • Practicing design thinking and whiteboarding potential solutions

• Week 6: Minimum Viable Product

  • Building a simple prototype using design and product tools

• Week 7: Early Users & Pitch Decks

  • Identifying user personas and designing the foundations of the pitch deck

• Week 8: Pitching & Branding

  • Perfecting a winning pitch and adding visual branding to the deck

• Week 9: Startup Finances & Venture Capital

  • Developing a business model and learning the startup investing process

• Week 10: Demo Day

Demo Day is the culmination of all of our hard work, where startup teams get to pitch their hearts out to a panel of acclaimed investors and founders in the greater Los Angeles startup ecosystem. Thanks to support from USC’s Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, teams can win up to $1,500 in grant funding and mentorship to kickstart their new ventures.

Coordinating the event is a big occasion involving many considerations: putting together a presentation, setting up the room, bringing judges on-campus, getting photographers, and other small details. You can watch the latest Demo Days I hosted below.

Facilitating General Meetings

Outside of Founder’s Education, all members convene through weekly meetings hosted by the Executive Board and me, a space designed for us to give announcements, run through ideas, and simply catch up. I like to end all of my meetings with shoutouts—a celebratory acclaim, a friend landing a new job, a startup team securing capital. We then break into the central event/theme of the meeting.

Sometimes, it’s an icebreaker to integrate our new members with the bigger community. We have some fun traditions; for example, members will be assigned a hilarious prompt and have to create a startup pitch out of it.

Sometimes, it’s a workshop focused on career development. Members pitch in to lead other members through lessons they might not learn in the traditional classroom setting: startup networking, personal branding, a rundown on the future of Web3. These workshops have been done in collaboration with other student organizations and have also been opened to the public for accessible entrepreneurship education.

Sometimes, it’s an exclusive speaker who talks about their entrepreneurship journey. Our External Affairs team works hard on these, bringing in founders launching YC-backed startups, venture capitalists investing in bright ideas, and innovative product leaders creating new software.

All of these meetings work in tandem to provide members with opportunities to network, learn, and simply be with friends.

Communication & Documentation

Now here’s a secret sauce to culture building: Knowing where everything is. I built tech infrastructure that allows us to pull up notes in an instant.

Slack, as formal as it sounds, is a springboard for consistent communication and announcements across the many SEP members and alumni. But we treat our Slack messaging a little more lax, like a text messaging group. I encourage members to create Slackmojis and new channels on topics they’re interested in so they can digitally discuss areas of interest. Needless to say, Slack has grown from a dreaded communication platform to a center of carefree conversations and inside jokes.

Notion was also a project I spearheaded to make our information visually engaging and easy to access. When I was first learning the ropes of the platform, I began to build out multiple databases for SEP, such as calendars, timelines, and alumni contact information. It’s now evolved to encompass our method for taking meeting notes and managing ongoing projects, and members have loved it so much that they themselves have transitioned to using Notion in their everyday lives.

Community Events

Finally, our community events. These are crafted with the intention of bringing everybody together—mostly spearheaded by the Internal Affairs team. We have retreats where we rent out Airbnbs on the outskirts of Los Angeles, invites where we dress up and bring friends, and banquets where we celebrate the accomplishments of the semester with charcuterie. In between, we host socials ranging from mixers to beach excursions.

I’ll let the pictures below speak for themselves. Community culture takes work to build, but moments like these make it all worth it.