Category: Individual Blog

By: Courtney Williams

Coming into college, I knew that I wanted to study entrepreneurship in hopes of learning more about what it takes to be a successful business owner. I knew that I wanted to take courses in entrepreneurship and participate in activities that will provide me with more insight on how to properly run a business. I learned about the T&M Seminar class during the second semester of my Freshman year when I was invited to apply for it. I was not sure if I should apply for the seminar because I was under the impression that it was not useful or beneficial for my major. However, as a business student, I did not know much about the technology/ engineering side of running a company, so I decided to apply for the seminar. This seminar was not a disappointment! Some of the key takeaways/learnings that were present from this seminar are the following:

By: Saloni Garg

I still remember sitting in class as a young third grader, being handed a personality questionnaire on the first day of school. I sped through it, writing down my favorite color (mint green, of course), favorite food, favorite hobby etc. until I got to a question that I wasn’t quite sure how to answer: “What’s your Dream Job?” At the time, I thought back to my parents –a software engineer and business owner. Instead of writing down one of these, however, I chose to write “Ice Cream Truck Driver.” Now, that was a fair answer considering I was just a third grader at the time. Through the years, however, I began seeing and hearing this question everywhere in different forms –“What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “What are you thinking about majoring in?”, “Where do you want to work”, “Why are you passionate about this role at our company?”, the list goes on. As the wording of this question changed, so did my response -from ice cream truck driver to entrepreneur, business-owner, mechanical engineer, software developer, teacher, and finally computer engineer (for now).

By: Mark Cruse

In the professional world today, Black people make up 8% of all white-collar jobs. (NBC News) For those who don’t understand the meaning of this number, allow me to explain. In America, Black buying power is a large factor in our overall GDP as a nation. Cheryl Grace, Nielsen’s Senior Vice President, states: “At 47.8 million strong and a buying power that’s on par with many countries’ gross domestic products, African Americans continue to outpace spending nationally” (Wright, Newsone, 2020) But the question that always arises in my head, is if Black people make up such a large percentage of the purchasing of products and services, why are so little of us involved in its creation?

By: Justin Holding

5,236 Students – 93 Days – 973,896 Meals–1,947,792 Food Containers

1,947,792 Containers to the Landfill. 0 were Recycled. All in University Housing Alone. During the Fall 2020 semester at the University of Illinois, University Dining Services discarded millions of containers. All of which went straight to the landfill. Every meal, students were given a plastic bag, plastic bottle, plastic clamshells, plastic utensils, and paper containers. The only thing that students might have recycled was the plastic bottle–University Recycling would not accept anything else.

By: Nicole Lee

As a Business major, I was first uncertain whether this T&M seminar will be beneficial tome or not. However, at the same time, I didn’t want to lose this precious opportunity that was given to me in which I can expand my knowledge outside of the business world and learn more about the technology and engineering aspects of businesses. Now that we successfully ended the seminar class, I can confidently say that this class deeply diversified my experiences and allowed me to grasp a countless amount of insightful information from each company and each speaker I encountered during the course of this seminar. In this blogpost, I want to share some of the main key takeaways I have from this class.