The E-Entrepreneur

I’m glad this stressful week was over. Midterms, meetings, deadlines, assignments…. you name it. Nonetheless, it was a great week for me, because:

1. iron ring: I received my iron ring on Tuesday! For those of you who don’t know the meaning behind the ring – the ring is presented to graduating engineering students across Canada. The ring acts as a reminder to the engineer of its social responsibilities and duties. So the iron rings are presented in a closed ceremony – no family members or friends allowed unless they are also engineers with the ring. Students have the option of having a qualified engineer present them with the ring. In my case, I got my high school physics teacher, who studied Civil Engineering, to pass me the ring.

2. making money with Clinicbook: as I mentioned, we had our first revenue for Clinicbook on Thursday. Revenue is good, so let’s keep it coming!

3. second place in UBC hockey intramurals: This term, I played on the ball hockey team with other Eng Fizzers (ie students who study Engineering Physics). Yesterday was the semi-final and final games. In the semi’s, our team came back from a 2-0 deficit to win the game 3-2 and advance to the final round. In the final round, we were leading 2-0, but the other team tied the game to force overtime. OT didn’t solve anything so we went into a shootout. After 7 shooters, the shootout was still tied, but the other team won with their 8th shooter. Even though we didn’t win, we felt good about ourselves because we didn’t think we were going to make it this far. More importantly, we had lots of fun together.

4a. meetings with great people: yesterday Robin and I spent the majority of our afternoons in meetings. First we met with our CYBF mentor George. CYBF is the Canadian Youth Business Foundation and they have a program for young entrepreneurs (like me and Robin). We met at the lounge in Hotel Vancouver, and they served delicious (but expensive) mochas and desserts. One thing that we talked about a lot was browser dependency issues. You see… we do our development mostly in Linux, meaning we use Chrome and Firefox. While Clinicbook looks clean in those two browsers, George reported to us that the website is not loading properly in IE, which is a HUGE issue for us since over half of our visitors are on IE. We have to fix this fast! In fact, Robin and George made a bet: $5 for the Clinicbook site to show up properly on IE by Wednesday.

4b. continuing with meeting great people: I met with two prominent entrepreneurs afterwards. Kenshi and Eric are young entrepreneurs who have recently moved here from the Bay area. They are here to recruit top developers for their online gaming company. Anyways, we spent time talking about strategies for Clinicbook, and they gave me a lot of different ideas. I think we all felt pretty excited afterwards (well at least for me definitely). So now I have a clear(er) vision for Clinicbook with a much larger potential.

5. surprise email from UBC: I got an email from UBC today saying that I have been “specially nominated by Student Development, Engineering for (my) sustained involvement and valuable contribution to the UBC Vancouver campus community, through (my) affiliation with Vancouver Student Entrepreneurship Assoc President, to be recognized and attend the UBC Student Leader Recognition Event, hosted by the Presidents’ Office.” Long sentence…. Anyways, it just means free food and I might get to meet the President of the University. But hey, I’m a “UBC Student Leader”!

Let’s hope that this “greatness” carries over into the weekend. Lots of work to do for Clinicbook, and I want to get the Clinicbook Blog up and running!