We are happy to announce that UMBC has been selected to put together a team of 5 students to work with P & G Cosmetics on a real world business problem!
Throughout the semester the team will work on a holistic marketing plan which will be presented at the end of the semester. This marketing plan challenges the team to provide new ideas and approaches to coming up with new products that are exciting to customers.
Meet the team:
Travis Dennis: Major/Minor: Chemical Engineering, Economics
I decided to do this competition because I it as a chance to practice problem solving and grow a relationship with this company for future employment opportunities. I do not have any entrepreneurial experience and am hoping to gain some through this process. In the future I plan on being an entrepreneur.
Jasmine Wands: Major/Minor: Environmental Studies, Entrepreneurship and Innovation
I decided to participate in this competition because it seemed like such an exciting, and fun, opportunity to learn more about intrepreneurship and innovation. Also, I love mascara (which is the specific product that we will be developing); it is literally the single best beauty product in the world!
I have some entrepreneurial experience. In my FYS 102 class, we started a business called LIVE, in which we designed a charm and app to be used to prevent date rape. I am also a consulting intern for a small startup, NK Webb Group. I hope to start my own business. In particular, I would like to open my own yoga studio.
William Rice: Major/Minor: Economics, Legal Policy
I am honored to be a member of the P&G competition team. I saw it as a great opportunity to represent my University alongside some of the best and brightest minds that our student community has to offer.
I have a fair amount of entrepreneurial experience, my main projects have been focused on digital application design. I have learned through trial and error that the most efficient way to find success is to exhaust your efforts on only those pursuits that provide an opportunity to leverage a gap in the existing market place.
I am enamored with the idea of being an entrepreneur mainly due to the degree of freedom that you have when you are your own boss. I am not entirely sure if entrepreneurship is my path, but I do know that I will end up in a profession where I have the capacity to increase my earnings through diligent work and focus.
Christiana Sasser: Majors: Mechanical Engineering and Environmental Science
I decided to do this competition because I love innovation and thinking of new ideas. I get to collaborate with a great group of fellow students. This is a great opportunity and a chance that I may never have again.
Last semester I took a FYS course called Creativity, Innovation, and Invention. The purpose of the class was to come up with a product idea and by the end of the semester hopefully take it to market. This experience really sparked my interest in entrepreneurship and invention.
I definitely plan to be an entrepreneur someday. I hope that through engineering I will be able to stay inventive and eventually create something amazing. I hope to change and help the world. With that in mind, I need to be innovative.
Emily Schultheis: Major/Minor: Chemical Engineering B.S., Entrepreneurship & Innovation Minor
As the sidekick of two entrepreneurial parents, I've had the benefit of participating in two start-up businesses for over five years. My mother, a physiologist turned novelist, slowly transformed her writing coaching career into a small, but selective publishing house. Since high school, she's hired me to design book covers, edit back cover copies, and troubleshoot story structure of aspiring manuscripts. Under her mentorship, I adapted her non-fiction book of story structure observations into a concise 16-variable algorithm that could be used as a predictive measure of market success.
My father is also in the process of transforming a hobby into a side-occupation. A few years ago, he bought me a 3D printer as a Christmas gift while we attended a National Instruments conference, at which my brother and I were giving presentations. Over the next year, I tried to scan objects using Kinect Xbox sensors. For fun, we printed sculptures of our whole family. He began experimenting with ways to post-process the plastic so that it resembles marble, metal, and looks far more expensive than it costs to make. On occasion, he has asked me to apply concepts I’ve learned in fluid mechanics and mechanics of materials to guesstimate his prototype requirements.
After I complete my chemical engineering background, I hope to contribute to his project ideas by applying concepts from material science to create new, safer materials with which to print. After my brother completes his electrical engineering degree, we plan to all work together to make this technology not only more accessible to medicine, but a common household product.