Tag: St. Louis

In a recent New York Times op-ed, St. Louis transplant and author Curtis Sittenfeld writes that it’s difficult to find friends here until you have children. As a happy newcomer to St. Louis, without children, I beg to differ.

St. Louis has many wonderful opportunities to meet people and make friends.

Last month, I went to a Young Professionals event at the St. Louis Art Museum  where they taught us how to make outdoor hanging flower pots out of recycled and re-purposed household items. While I was openly reporting my inability to get the pot to hang upright, I also commented on how I loved a girl’s hair next to me. I didn’t know her, but we discussed how I couldn’t fish-tail braid and she taught me. I admit that sounds about as stereotypical as it comes, but it was a fun way to meet someone new. How did I find this opportunity? Online. And it was free.

There are also many different nonprofits around St. Louis and many of them have Young Professional Boards. Some request a more formal application and interview, but for many, you can email the nonprofit, say you are interested in supporting the cause, and boom! you have monthly meetings where you get to meet new people (and you already have something in common with them).

I have been fortunate enough to serve on the Young Friends Council at the Missouri Botanical Garden.  After each meeting, some of the members go to dinner. Sure, it’s a little awkward at first, but if you keep going, you start to see similar people and friendships develop.

Then there are the innovation labs that are popping up around downtown St. Louis that offer many new friend opportunities.

Take Lab 1500  for example. Lab 1500 allows anyone with a great idea to meet with other entrepreneurs. Together, they can work out business ideas, take workshops to enhance their business knowledge, and create a better foundation for themselves and their projects. It also provides space for people to set up their laptops, work in a communal environment, and have access to networking and educational events. And guess what?  The cost of living in St. Louis compared to the coasts is much more reasonable, so entrepreneurs can actually spend time on their great idea or innovation.

In reading Sittenfeld’s op-ed tale of a friendless life in St. Louis before having children, I found myself appreciating my own experience. While I have been fortunate to have the Olin community as a strong support system, I still disagree with the writer’s inability to find friends.

Finding new friends is never easy, especially if you have not had the experience of  since you were in Pre-K. It’s a combination of finding your interests, trying something new, and making a match with what St. Louis has to offer – all of which can be done in a quick Google search.

It can be intimidating, but in trying to find new friends, you also get to rediscover yourself.  And that might be the most rewarding experience of all.

Two first year MBA students, Katie Miller and Alex McDonnell, spent their Saturday morning planting seedlings for Missouri Forest ReLeaf. 

Forest ReLeaf is an organization that was founded 20 years ago in an effort to raise awareness of the need for trees within cities and to inspire local volunteers to plant more trees in their communities.

Katie and Alex pause for the camera while helping pot 2,000 seedlings on a recent Saturday.

On Saturday, Katie and Alex helped a volunteer group to plant over 2,000 seedlings in St. Louis!  It is great to see the commitment of our MBA students to the St. Louis community!

Katie Miller serves as the President of the Olin chapter of NetImpact.  NetImpact is an student organization that encourages and teaches business students the importance of  sustainability, corporate responsibility, and social entrepreneurship.

Click here to learn more about Missouri Forest ReLeaf or Olin NetImpact.

This past November, I came back from a late night of going out with some friends, and opened my computer to an email from my Consumer Behavior Professor Joe Goodman. The email described a website called Rally St. Louis.  I read through the description,  and the email couldn’t have been more than 25 words and a link to the website.  I lazily clicked on it and was immediately intrigued.

Rally St. Louis is an online platform for people of St. Louis to submit ideas to make St. Louis a better place.  Once ideas are submitted they become public, and people can vote on the ideas they like once a day.  The ideas with the most votes at the end of each month get “valued” at a certain goal of money and moved onto the funding stage.  Once the idea gets submitted to the funding stage anyone can donate any amount of money to help the ideas become a reality.  The whole idea is to give people with good ideas a voice and a vehicle for their voice to be heard.

Having grown up in St. Louis my whole life, I thought this was an awesome opportunity to submit an idea that I have always had a certain passion for but no way to make it happen or get it started. My idea, Project Blacktop, is to turn empty unused lots in the city of St. Louis into basketball courts.  The idea is to beautify these empty lots with basketball courts which look nice and appealing when you drive by them.  The continuation of Project Blacktop is to host youth basketball clinics for neighborhood kids, and summer adult pickup basketball games and leagues.  The idea is for these courts to be active, positive spaces for the community.  The idea relies on the courts being used regularly and becoming positive spaces for community building events.

That night I typed up a quick description of my idea, and submitted it to the RallySTL website.   I wrote about two paragraphs basically describing what I wrote in the paragraph above, and placed a random stock image picture of an urban basketball court under the description (it was an awful picture).   The whole process of submitting my idea took about 15 minutes.  After I submitted my idea I had a URL that I could copy and paste and send to whomever I wanted.  I blasted it out to my Facebook friends that night via a Facebook status saying “Please vote for my idea!”.  I slept in the next day and woke up as the #4 vote getter on the entire website. It was the first week of the contest, so I only had around 40 votes.  I continued to post on my Facebook everyday, along with sending the link out to family and friends with a quick description behind the whole idea.

Before I knew it, I was about 200 votes in the lead of all the other ideas and quickly approaching 1000 votes for the month of December.  Other ideas were picking up steam and became clear frontrunners to finish within the top 5 at the end of the month.

RallySTL makes it incredibly easy to make a difference in the city.  They give you the portal you need to do your own marketing.  It is the quickest way to raise awareness about an idea that you are passionate about.

Being at Wash U really helped me raise awareness and votes.  Students are a young tech- savvy audience who check their Facebook accounts religiously.  All I had to do was post the link and before I knew it people who wanted to do anything but study for finals were distracted by voting for Project Blacktop daily.

The end of December rolled around, and I was #4 in total votes for the month and my idea was moved onto the “Funding” stage of RallySTL.  My project was valued at $10,000, which means that I have 90 days to “crowdfund” my idea to reach a goal of $10,000.  RallySTL makes funding easy as well, because once again I had a URL I could send to whomever I wanted.  I sent it to friends, family, teachers, and local businesses. And before I knew it I had people donating money everyday.

I’m currently in the middle of the funding stage and leading all other RallySTL ideas with 22% of my project funded.  This whole experience has happened so fast, and honestly it has become more than I had ever imagined. That night that I answered an email from a professor and took 15 minutes to submit an idea became something I’m extremely proud of and a great thing for my resume.  I receive 10-15 emails everyday from people in the community who have seen my idea and want to donate, or congratulate me, or give me feedback on how to improve my funding strategy.  I have made so many amazing connections in the St. Louis community and Project Blacktop has garnered some great press over the past 3-4 months.

I wrote this blog post to prove that it is easy to make a difference. If you have an idea, speak up, let it be heard, and try it out. See what people have to say about it.  You don’t need to be a rich philanthropist, a social policy leader, or the mayor.  I’m a 20 year old college junior with $66.63 in my bank account right now and I am on my way to raising over $10,000 and starting a charity that makes a difference in the St. Louis community.  I encourage all Olin students to bring their ideas to life through all of the amazing resources Wash U and St. Louis offer, whether it be RallySTL, Olin Sustainability Challenge, or the Skandalaris Center.

Below are some links to further educate you on RallySTL and Project Blacktop.

Tim Cooney, BSBA 2014

Project Blacktop:

http://www.rallystl.org/Ideas/Detail/43

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4IPpn0DR6w

 Hoop photo by Ryan Gregor

After a year of planning, last Friday afternoon we celebrated the final presentations of the Olin Sustainability Case Competition (OSCC)!  This was the fourth year of the competition, which began as a way to increase awareness about sustainability as it relates to business practices.

This year, we had more than 20 teams express interest in the competition. The case topic was “Blight, Plight, and Urban Flight: Stimulating the Sustainable Development of Vacant Land in the City of St. Louis.” For the first year ever, the case writers decided to take the case off-campus and work with administrators from the City of St. Louis to develop a case that would produce implementable ideas to reduce the amount of vacant land around our city.

After weeks of reviewing submissions, the committee narrowed it down to our final three teams. These teams presented their ideas to a room of about 100 people, including our corporate sponsors from Novus and Tarlton, as well as a prestigious judging panel made up of administrators from around the Washington University campus and the City of St. Louis.

At the end of the day, Team 4 and Team 13 tied for first place and each team won $4,000!

Team 4: Watch Team 4’s Video Submission
Brian Arnold, MS in Finance 2013
Deona DeClue, Juris Doctor 2013
Cody Greer, PhD Neuroscience 2017
Benjamin Mueller, MS Construction Management 2015

Team 13: Watch Team 13’s Video Submission
Megan Berry, Master of Architecture 2014
Grace Goldstein, Master of Architecture 2015
Grant McCracken, BA Architecture and English Literature 2014

And Team 8 came in as our runners-up winning a prize of $2,000!

Team 8: Watch Team 8’s Video Submission
Steven Boughton, MBA 2014
Daniela Pacurar, MBA 2014
John (Turner) Peters, MBA 2014

Be on the look-out for the Fifth Annual Olin Sustainability Case Competition next year!  In the meantime, be sure to congratulate our 2013 winning teams!

Students will travel downtown to T-REx, home to entrepreneurial startups in the historic Railway Exchange building for the new MGT550X course. The experimental elective is a collaboration between Olin and Wash U’s engineering and law schools. Students will work in consulting teams with companies on projects ranging from marketing to revenue modeling.

Companies participating in the inaugural semester include:

• Food Essentials
• Makaboo
• MedPreps
• IDC Projects
• Tunsespeak
• Observable Networks
• BusyEvent
• Graematter

Read more about the course in Olin News.