On Sept. 15th, the opening ceremony of the Stanford-USTC-MIT (SUM) 2014 Student Entrepreneurship was held in University of Science and Technology of China. There were about 40 students, from Stanford, MIT and USTC attending this ceremony. The goal of this camp is to exchange ideas among academia, industry and culture. Students from these three universities would spend 10 days together working on business cases and visiting well-known companies.
During the ceremony, Prof. CHEN Chusheng, vice president of USTC, said welcome to all the SUMers this year. He also wished everyone could really enjoy this 10 days’journey. And then Prof. ZHANG Jie shared his own experience of studying, teaching and starting an undertaking with these three universities, and was very glad that there is a platform for students of three universities to work together. Then Prof. YU Yugang, president of School of Management of USTC, introduced the cases that SUMers would work on in this camp and get a chance to solve cross-cultural issues. Mr. Huang Weidong from Hefei Public Resource Center the achievement promised that SUMers would provide meaningful reference for public resources in Hefei. Dr. Sjoerd de Ridder hosted the ceremony.
This year SUM would focus on analyzing business plan cases. Five SUMers would work as a team constituting by students from different background in culture and majors. The cases are brought about in order to provide an international prospective for the students to handle with. Different from other usual case studies, this time the cases would cover issues that need students to jump out of their comfort zone, in which they are used to the cultures and regulations, to consider more about cultural conflicts and local markets features. Four cases are provided in SUM, and there would be two mentors for each case with professional experience to help them in the whole 10 days. They would offer detailed instructions to make sure students understand the cases thoroughly then obtain novel and efficient ideas. Finally SUMers will present their plans and get precious feedbacks from the peer and specialists.
The four cases are from iFlytek, Wanxin Media, Xingtai Holding Group and Hefei Public Resource Center. They are all famous companies and the cases could represent well in the local level and the international level. SUMers also have the opportunities to visit these companies in themselves, to know more information about all these companies.
In the ceremony, every one introduced themselves in an interesting “say hello” video. Then WU Bei from USTC, Adam Weitz Goldberg from Stanford and Erik Duhaime from MIT, showed us their home universities with their own experience and videos. The attractive and appealing videos make SUMers know more about each other.
What is more, SUMers from America can also enjoy their days while playing Taiji, enjoying Chinese tea, and talking with students in USTC. They could get to know Chinese culture in the memorable ten days.
Stanford-USTC-MIT events (aka SUM) are a platform for faculties and students in Stanford, USTC, and MIT. It was firstly held in 2012, in Geophysical, transforming into Physics, Chemistry and Geophysics in 2013 and developing into Management Science this year. The research area is changing, and the forms and organized events are expanding and developing. These three universities would continue collaborations in different areas in the future, and provide more opportunities for exchanging through SUM.
(SHAO Chen, USTC News Center)