This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Emory chapter.
Meet this week’s Campus Celebrity, Sarah — President of Emory Entrepreneurship & Venture Management! To learn more about EEVM, check out their website here.
Name: Sarah Choi
Major: Finance (BBA) and Mathematics (BA)
Hometown: Lawrenceville, GA
Extracurricular Activities: President of Emory Entrepreneurship & Venture Management (EEVM), RA in Raoul Hall, Lead TA for BUS 680 and BUS 681
Relationship Status: Single
Greek Affiliation: Gamma Phi Beta
Her Campus Emory (HCE): How did you become involved with EEVM? What is your favorite part of it?
Sarah Choi (SC): Summer after my freshman year, I had an amazing experience interning for an online retail startup that was started by an Emory MBA alumnus. When I returned for sophomore year, my friend Amy happened to drag me to EEVM’s interest meeting. I was looking for a way to stay involved in the startup space so it seemed like a perfect opportunity. Soon, Amy and I joined the founding team of EEVM and have been active ever since!
The exec board members are definitely my favorite part of EEVM. I love that I am constantly surrounded by a group of smart, passionate, hardworking, and fun people. EEVM is honestly a lot of time and energy, but it has been so much easier thanks to our members doing a great job with each of their parts and just being amazing people.
HCE: What are some of your duties as the President of the club?
SC: Last year, while we were updating our website, one of our members put “Tiger Mom” under my name as a joke. We eventually replaced it with my actual title, but I think that’s a pretty accurate description of what I do for EEVM. Simply put, I oversee all of our divisions and spend a lot of my time communicating my VPs and Directors. But I also have a lot of smaller tasks, like attending meetings, answering emails, planning social events, and even baking brownies for our meeting. Occasionally I also have to talks with people who are falling behind on their work or even let people go, and this is definitely the least fun part of my job.
HCE: What have been your greatest challenge and greatest achievement?
SC: Since we started EEVM three years ago, we have not only hosted great events, like HackATL, but also started numerous programs, like our Excellerator, IQ Magazine, and Consulting group (EVSP). This rapid expansion definitely helped us get our name out and establish ourselves on campus, but was also our greatest challenge. It was easy for us to get distracted on our long-term projects and some of our groups didn’t get the attention they needed. This year, we have been spending some time to take a step back and think about our priorities. This has been helpful but we need to continue to make sure not to lose focus in the midst of everything going on.
I think our most celebrated achievement is starting HackATL. We started HackATL in September 2013 as a business hackathon, combining all the best parts of a pitch competition and a tech hackathon. We had just formed EEVM and only had about 4 weeks to plan the event, but somehow we managed to host a successful event with 300-400 participants. Now, HackATL is a well-known name on campus (maybe even more than EEVM itself) and we have amazing sponsors and massive prizes, including up to $200k in investments to the winning teams.
HCE: Do you have any suggestions for students looking to get involved? How can other students at Emory keep up with what you guys are doing?
SC: We host a ton of events on campus that are open to everyone. These events are great for anyone interested in startups, venture capital, technology, business, or even just innovation in general. The events are also a fantastic way to meet some of the most interesting people since we get a variety of people from all different majors and even people outside of Emory.
If any of our activities seem interesting to you, I would highly recommend joining our general body. We keep our general body members updated with all of our events as well as other related events on campus and in the Atlanta area. In addition, active general body members will have the opportunity to join our innovation group and executive board.
HCE: Are there any goals EEVM has for the upcoming year?
SC: EEVM’s mission is twofold—to promote entrepreneurship on campus and to support Emory’s student entrepreneurs. We have been highly successful with getting our name and mission out there, so now we have been focusing on providing more tangible resources to our entrepreneurs. In addition, we have been modifying our general body member program and started offering a new innovation group program to allow GBMs to have more responsibilities and transition into future executive board members. Furthermore, each of our groups have their own exciting initiatives for the year, so please keep in touch and see what new things come out of EEVM!