Week 2 of my UCI Applied Innovation internship has just wrapped up; since I started a week early, and the first week was “Week 0”, I’m now done with the first month of my internships.
This week, the Cove interns and I got to chat with some really incredible speakers from across industries. Tracy Kwiker’s story about getting to visit and do business in the then-USSR because of her dedication to becoming fluent in Russian really resonated with me. Fabian Geyrhalter brought to the forefront a big problem that startups have: not crafting a solidified brand alongside their products. Marc Wynne told us about all the resources the White House is currently pushing for STEM entrepreneurship. Rounding out the week, Richard Sudek showed us a montage of Tech Coast Angels Series A pitches, and had us guess which ones did best. The catch was we didn’t get to rate the pitches based on delivery for the first round of guesses; instead, we read the pitches and ranked them. After watching the actual pitches, some mediocre written pitches sharply rose in the rankings, while some well-crafted written pitches were sunk by very poor delivery.
At Chicklabs, I’ve been busy reformatting the Immuno Gum website with updated content and a refreshed look, replacing all of the old versions of our products to create a cohesive brand image for future consumers and investors alike. This has involved going through the WordPress code to figure out archaic configurations left over from whoever originally created the website, removing unnecessary plugins to add a menu, and getting increasingly creative with Microsoft Word to create new images and content for the site.
Andrew Jabara 