Breathing a sigh of relief as he left the presentation room, Andrew Guenther, a local student from Washington Township High School, says he was highly impressed with the program at Purdue Research Park. This past week, Guenther, along with one other student from the Valparaiso-area, attended the Purdue Research Park High School Entrepreneurship Academy. This year marked the 6th year of the academy and boasted 50 of the most business-savvy incoming high school juniors and seniors in Indiana.
Held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, students are split into teams of 5 and are given a new, high-tech innovation that has been created by students at the Purdue Research Park. Some examples include new cartilage grafts, improvements to air turbines for efficiency and bio-fuel harvested from algae. Students then attend seminars on how to market products, speak in front of groups and how to figure out the finances of their business.
Also while at the Academy, students lived in the college dorms, ate in the food courts and toured the campus of Purdue University. The students were also given the chance to tour some of the business' located in the Purdue Research Park, meet some up and coming entrepreneurs and see actual investment pitches. Guenther said, “The campus and Research Park were both beautiful. It's amazing to see what is being created right here in Indiana.”
The students were then given 5 days to research their products, create a 10-slide presentation and prepare their material to give a 15-minute investor pitch to actual investors on Friday. Investors were then given 5-minute to question the students. Guenthers team, containing students from West Lafayette, Indianapolis, Fishers and Evansville, were given a new form of early detection viral diagnostics software (which they named DiagnosEASE), produced at Purdue University. The students then created fake backgrounds (some saying they attended UPenn and Harvard), ran financial sequences, created marketing campaigns and designed manufacturing and clinical trial information.
After the presentations were completed, the students and their parents, as well as some entrepreneurs, the judges and executives at Purdue, attended the Awards Dinner in the Union Hall. Here, the top three teams were awarded tuition vouchers valued at $100, $250 and $500 apiece (in ascending order). The third place team was NoScar, a new process of healing injuries that resulted in a significantly smaller area of scarring. In second place came Cancer Detections Solutions, a revolutionary system of marking and detecting tumors without invasive procedures. In first place was DiagnosEASE, a viral diagnostics system that detects virus' weeks before conventional systems, takes a few minutes and costs roughly five cents a test.
Guenther says, “I highly recommend the Purdue Research Park High School Entrepreneurship Academy to incoming juniors and seniors in high school. It is one of the most intense and rewarding programs of its kind and truly does show you the risks, rewards and uncertainty involved in owning your own business. Dr. Peoples and Ms. Spiker know how to run a great program!”
Photo: From left to right; Julia Russo, Evansville; Brianna Bartrom, West Lafayette; Davis Arick, Fishers; Andrew Guenther, Valparaiso; Samuel Kane, Indianapolis. Ahmed Amin of Microfluidic Innovations LLC mentored them.