Launching a Club by Alan

Launching a Club by Alan - November 2019 Scholarship Essay

I vividly remember when my friend first approached me with the idea of starting a club at our high school. It was somewhere in the beginning of junior year when he first asked me what I thought of his idea. He told me to look up Launchx and find out as much as I could. I followed his instructions and was immediately intrigued. Launchx is a club that's run through MIT, and serves as an entrepreneurship platform specifically for high school students. Despite entrepreneurship and business not being in my career plans, my friend had recruited me to help him start the club at our high school specifically because he needed someone to be the HR lead who could talk to people and get them excited about our ideas. Together, my friend and I had to go through all the usual steps to start a high school club. We attended board meetings, wrote a proposal, found faculty advisors, rallied interest among the student body. We also had to submit an application to Launchx itself, in order for them to allow our school to have a branch. After a few months of jumping through these hoops and regulations and dodging hurdles and other small problems, we were finally approved to start this club at our high school.

I think this was one of my greatest achievements in terms of directly helping the student body while I was still in high school. From the beginning, we had never meant to produce a viable business plan that could bring in revenue, even though the platform of Launchx certainly allowed and even encouraged that. The goal for me and my friend while starting the club was merely bringing it to our high school and giving it a solid foundation so that it could flourish after we graduated. So while it was finally approved in our last year of high school, we spent that time building connections and growing membership among the underclassmen, making sure that once we graduated, the club would still function to grow and explore students’ entrepreneurial ideas and give them first-hand experience at what it would be like to be in a start-up. To our surprise, our team still did very well in our first year. Each of our teams successfully developed our individual business plans and we were all able to get assigned mentors from MIT. Furthermore, one of our teams had even advanced far enough to showcase their proposal at a demo day that was hosted in NYC. To the extent of my knowledge, that team is still working on their start-up, despite all of their members being in college. They plan to begin implementing their educational product within the next few months, with the approval of 10+ school districts around our area.

Overall, I was immensely proud of the work that we had put into this club. I loved starting it and had the opportunity to watch it grow from literally nothing into something that was meaningful and inspiring. I cannot wait to go back and see how the club is doing now. I count it as one of my greatest accomplishments in high school, as I saw it as me giving back to the student body which had already given me so much in those 4 years.