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The AmTech Career Academy held an Entrepeneur’s Edge Conference on Friday for area high school students to give them a chance to highlight and learn business skills in various challenges and team-building exercises.
Students from across the city were tasked with creating a new bagel for the Bagel Place, ideas for a new food truck for the district and a shark tank-style challenge to pitch their business ventures to various high school principals who acted as the investors.
The pitches for the challenge ran the gamut from socks that delivered cold to one’s feet to a phone app to report rumors. Among the winning groups’ ideas of the day was an app called Storm Music, which advertised itself as taking your musical imagination by storm.
Braylee Chinea, Madison Jacobs, Denisse Mancillas, Ellen Head and Gabriel Alverez led the team that came up with Storm Music. Each team member spoke to the panel and gave input to the idea.
Alverez, a junior from Caprock High School, said it was a wonderful experience working with others to produce these pitches and ideas.
“What my group did was come up with the idea of a musical app where you can do or listen to your own type of music or music that is unique to who you are,” Alverez said. “If you want to make music like DJ Khalid, Drake, J Cole or whatever, you want to stand out to the public.”
He said that collaborating with others he has never worked with before to develop a presentable idea was a challenge, and it was exciting to work together to produce these ideas to impress the panel.
“It was a little nerve-racking, but once we got over that, we worked together to come up with these ideas to present,” Alverez said. “My greatest takeaway from today is just to do it. Do not let anything hold you back. There is always the concern, what if you do not make it, but what if you do.”
His group also won their challenge to create a bagel, which was a cranberry jalapeno flavored bagel.
“I really gained a lot of confidence in being able to talk to people and present my ideas to others,” he said. “This gave me a lot of confidence that business could take you to a place you could never imagine from Amarillo.”
Amarillo High School Principal Andrea Pfeifer said this experience was valuable to students to interact with a diverse group of students from across the city.
“This opportunity to come together and work on a project where they can put into play their creativity and their ideas as a team, with a time crunch, with a specific assignment, with a result and an outcome, is an incredible skill to develop,” Pfeifer said. “This translates very easily into their experiences in college, at work, and in life as they have families and make their way through life.”
She said this type of nontraditional setting is timely and relevant.
“This integrates with their culture and allows them to put into play some of their fantastic ideas,” Pfeifer said. “The modern student today has an entrepreneurial spirit with digital technology at the forefront. Doing activities like this in school matches their world with their ideas, but also brings it into the criteria we have in business classes across our district. It is a wonderful way to incorporate what they are thinking about and what they are doing every day into a school assignment.”
Beth Dumaoal, the marketing teacher for AmTech, spoke about the value of Friday’s conference for students.
“Our whole idea today was to bring in our entrepreneurship students to kind of challenge them to decide on their next steps,” Dumaoal said, “not necessarily that they want to know what they want to do tomorrow, but to give them some insight in what they want to do in a couple of years.”
Industry professionals were brought in to guide students on what it takes to start a business and how to brainstorm ideas.
“We wanted to challenge them to think out of the box in competition to come up with these ideas on the fly to really sell it to a panel of investors,” she said. “Not everybody in this room is going to be a small business owner, but an entrepreneurial mindset to come up with innovation in any setting that they may be in to set them apart is what we are trying to encourage with this conference.”
Dumaoal said that seeing the students produce these ideas, while working with other students they have never worked with before, was an amazing testament to the area’s students.
“These students were so brilliant to be able to come up with some of these cool ideas in such a limited amount of time,” Dumaoal said. “We wanted them to be able to work as a team in a setting they are less comfortable with. This exercise helped them work on idea generation for these students. It was great to see these students using classroom concepts in a real-world scenario.”
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