Strive is an engineering-entrepreneurship club I co-founded at the University of British Columbia. Our members achieve personal growth through mentor/mentee relationships, technical consulting projects, Q&A sessions with successful entrepreneurs, and a great group of like-minded peers to hang out with! (Check out our website, I designed it!)
Through my work as Director of Media and Marketing, as well as Project Manager and Designer in the Consulting division, I have learned many diverse skills and worked with many multi-disciplinary teams, as outlined below:
Project Manager and Designer
Working as a Project Manager in the Consulting division of STRIVE allowed me to understand how to lead a team in solving a loosely defined problem in real-world context. In my tenure I have worked with Encorp Pacific (Return-It BC) as well as a startup agriculture technology.
Working with the startup agriculture technology both as project manager and designer allowed me to gain experience in both management and design work. The startup is development proprietary laser technology to improve the yield of crops through excitation in seeds. Because an NDA was signed, I cannot go intro great detail on the work that I have developed, I can provide high-level overviews of the process.
Having led weekly client meetings and internal design meetings, target design specifications were identified and designs were made for prototyping purposes.
One of my tasks as designer on the project was to develop a testing rig for the laser technology. I started off with sketches of the design, and then used evaluation techniques such as the Pugh Chart and the Weighted Design Matrix to rank concepts based on the client needs. Finally, I created a model in Solidworks to present to the client and discuss its key functionalities. I have provided a video demonstration of this model in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Demonstration of Laser Test Bench Assembly
My focus on the Return-It project was the improvement of their current ExpressNGo Kiosks. These kiosks are placed around the lower mainland to act as mobile bottle return depots.
As project manager, I reached out to the clients, leading multiple problem clarification meetings to understand their needs and requirements, as well as progress update and design meetings with the design team.
My role in this project was mostly management based, and so I was tasked with understanding logistics and financials - such as creating Bill of Materials and creating Project Timelines to ensure seamless flow throughout the project.
Director of Media and Marketing
Having co-founded the club during the COVID-19 Pandemic, being tasked with brand awareness and outreach proved challenging. With little prior experience, I brought it upon myself to learn how to effectively market our brand and created marketing initiatives to help us gain traction.
I gained extensive experience with working in a multi-disciplinary team across business and engineering to work towards our goal. I was in charge of managing our LinkedIn and Instagram - as well as in charge of creating the content for those platforms. We were able to successfully hit our follower and membership goals - with an amazing 30 members joining the club through solely online marketing and zero on-campus interaction. I also designed our logo and created our website!
