I’d come across posts and recruitment advertisements for the Future Science Scholar Organization (FuSSO) for quite a while before I decided to complete their application form. After I joined, my work experience was forever been elevated and became much more professional compared to the work I had done prior to joining at school. After about a month into working at the nonprofit, the founder and CEO, Sophia, presented me with the opportunity of being their chief marketing officer, and I was thrilled. Now, after a month of planning and communications, FuSSO is finally ready to launch the FutureForge program, a year-long series of workshops and mentorship for students to launch their groundbreaking ideas into reality.
I have always been into entrepreneurship, and launching my own fashion brand and podcast has been great experience already, but I am always hungry for something a bit more challenging. Maybe it’s because I am not in that state of building my own business yet, but FuSSO has definitely provided me with the right platform to experience the full process. Shortly after I joined, FuSSO was successfully registered as a nonprofit organization in North Carolina, and we worked towards turning FuSSO into a professional business with running cash flow like a startup. In the process, we launched the FutureForge program to comply with our focus this year of helping more students turn their groundbreaking ideas into real research and business projects in interdisciplinary realms based in STEM innovation.
The program is mentored and judged by faculty and students from the top 30 universities in the United States. Additionally, workshops are tailored to meet the needs of all stages of entrepreneurship and research – from writing a good business proposal to how to market a project, everything is covered by this year-long program. As an entrepreneur (it still feels weird saying that, but I do believe that what I am doing makes me qualified), even though I have learned some things about entrepreneurship here and there, there was never something that was systematically helping me build my business throughout the process. Thus, I do hope that everyone who is willing to build their own startup projects gets the opportunity to get their hands on this program to guide them throughout the entire process. This program even features a workshop that teaches you how to protect intellectual property. Because I am not the type of person who is really into innovation things, I sometimes view it as something extra, but it is super useful if you have new innovation projects going on.
Building this program took us quite a while to put together, and I can still remember clearly the meeting that we had when we were discussing the pricing and schedule of the program – that meeting was incredibly vital to the birth of the program. Throughout the process of building this program, I was able to grow my entrepreneurship skills significantly. I suddenly realized that marketing, the term that basically is equivalent to social media nowadays, is not as simple as simply posting a few photos or videos of something and randomly expecting thousands of people to get interested in what we are trying to do. I have always loved social media and have used it to post all sorts of things, but when it comes to promoting something for a business, I learned that apps and platforms have grown to such a capacity that you need to be so strategic and straightforward with things or else people will simply not get interested in any of the things you are promoting. However, even though I have learned my lesson, I still do not have a strategy in mind for promoting FuSSO and its programs. But if you are having the same issue as I am, I bet the marketing workshop series will help a lot.
More info on the event is here:
I hope that this can help you or someone you know can find their entrepreneurial direction and strategies through this program to bring those groundbreaking ideas to reality!
Images: Margaret Yang, Pexels
