First off I would like to take a brief moment to thank the Lilly Endowment for providing me with the opportunity to take part in the LABB program. This week we welcomed our instructor Roland Morin, back from relinquishment of his role to Will Weber ’11 who is was versed in finance and took on the responsibility of imparting his knowledge onto us. At the beginning of the week we did our restaurant pitches that were supposed to one, give us an idea of what being an entrepreneur is like, two, to provide us with the experience to give pitches in front of judges who acted as potential clients, and finally as Roland delicately put it, “to never want to start a restaurant ever”. I thought all the members of the Labb program did a fantastic job presenting their restaurant ideas to the judges and I quickly became aware of how innovative my fellow co-workers are. My group in particular received the most investments from the judges so we were very excited that they found the family restaurant to have the most potential out of all the great ideas that the other groups presented. Later that week we had Dean Raters come in and present his consulting project that presents a challenging but doable task. My colleagues are excited to begin working on that project and I am sure they will be efficient and effective with their efforts. With Roland back in the mix we
went through a Marketing 101 crash course that took us through the essentials of marketing and it gave us an opportunity to practice the strategies and concepts we learned in group activities. After participating in the marketing immersion program and my brief experience with the Labb program I believe that marketing is the career path for me. Roland’s expertise in the field has and will be valuable for myself and my co-workers for the duration of our internship and for possible future internships. We capped off a successful week with guest speaker, Rob Shook talking about his career with IBM and the keys to having a successful career in business and in life. I was moved by his words and he is definitely an alum that all Wabash men should aspire to become. He has proven to be a successful man of the industry as well as a man of faith and for that I can call him a hero of mine.
