Describe your role as President of the Mohawk Students’ Association Entrepreneurship Club and your involvement in SURGE I find the title of President to be somewhat of a misnomer. My role is not about leading or directing. The role, as I see it, is about finding the students who might have a seed of interest in starting their own businesses and encouraging it to grow. The Club is a space where students can hash out their business ideas and get constructive feedback from students, faculty, and guests. One of the main goals I have for the Club is to create a nexus where students from different programs can find or trade the skills they need for their ventures without having to worry about funding. My job is simply to connect people together. How have you benefited from SURGE and what do you hope to gain from it in the future? Perhaps the most exciting aspect of being involved with an initiative like SURGE is having the opportunity to meet and converse with people who are creating, or have created, their own entrepreneurial endeavours. Knowing that people are actually doing these things is inspiring and the lessons I have learned from them have become important tools in my entrepreneurial lexicon.
In the upcoming year, I expect I will be able to learn much more from SURGE events and the people participating in them. Once I am finished at Mohawk, I am also hopeful that these new skills will set me apart from the crowd. In last year’s Startup Weekend (Maker Edition) you were part of team that won first prize –explain your winning app idea Crosspoint and what the next steps are in your venture? The idea behind Crosspoint is to find a way that allows people with similar interests to find each other so that they can participate in activities. Too often, we find ourselves looking for something to do or somewhere to go; only to find our circle of friends are either uninterested or unavailable. With the Crosspoint app, we can expand that circle to people who do what you want to do. The next steps for Crosspoint is to continue development into a working and testable platform. Once that is completed, we will launch a beta test that will allow us to measure and determine its usability and, more importantly, popularity.
Aaron Perras Mohawk College Entrepreneurship Club President
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