Campus Celebrity: Ronald Vieira
Graduation year: 2016
Majors/minors: Accounting
Hometown: Valencia, Venezuela
Activities you’re involved in on campus: Faves, International Students’ Society, CinciGlobal
To start off, could you give a brief overview of the Student-Run Business (SRB) program in the Williams College of Business (WCB) and how you got involved?
SRB is a program crafted to compliment in-class room academic learning with experiential learning opportunities. Basically, it’s a program that helps you reconcile things that you learn in the classroom with real-life activities. It’s focused on business classes but not necessarily business students. I was one of the founding members that helped begin this program with the former dean of the business school and Owen Raisch.
What made you interested in doing such a big project such as a SRB? Have you always been interested in entrepreneurship?
When I went to the informational meeting, I just wanted to get involved in something progressive and reactive moreso than just a company. I just knew! I grew up on entrepreneurship; my family owns a lot of companies related to the movie exhibition field.
How did the idea of Faves – a student-run eatery coming to the CLC – come about?
At that point I had been three years on campus, and I felt like there wasn’t enough healthy options on campus. I come from Venezuela and usually your food is healthy food; there was a really heavy focus on eating well. One of the things we have at Faves are the smoothies to mimic Venezuela where, when you sit down to eat, you always have a juice.
What has been the most challenging part of working on Faves has been, and what do you think has been the most rewarding experience so far?
Parts of the University. Sometimes you face agisim in the University… people looking down on us because we’re younger. It’s going to happen, and we’re definitely still progressing despite it, but there seem to be a ton of barriers set up to prevent getting things done. There needs to be trust in their young students; they need to believe in their own teaching that they’re preparing us to do a good job. We wouldn’t be working so hard at this if we wanted it to fail!
Very ironically but directly correlated, the most rewarding thing has been the empowerment of doing things just as a student.
How do you see your SRB as well as the entire program progress even after you graduate?
Just fine. We’re setting up everything from the beginning to see it grow past our time here at Xavier.