{"id":5153,"date":"2026-07-26T17:47:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T17:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/?p=5153"},"modified":"2026-07-26T17:47:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T17:47:51","slug":"chen-29-bip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/2026\/07\/26\/chen-29-bip\/","title":{"rendered":"Chen ’29 | BIP"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When I signed up for the Business Immersion Program (BIP) through the Center for Innovation, Business, and Entrepreneurship (CIBE), I figured it would be a little outside my lane. I am an international student from China, and most of my time at Wabash goes into physics and math. Business was not really my world. A few weeks in, I stopped thinking of it that way. The summer changed how I look at my own work, and most of that came down to a handful of people and conversations I keep replaying in my head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one I think about most happened when we drove up to Indianapolis to visit Indy. We met Josh Kline, the co-founder of REVelry, and he turned out to be a big AI fan like me. At some point he said something that landed harder than he probably realized: don’t settle for a dumb job or a routine internship, use AI and your own creativity to build something instead. I had been circling that idea for a while without ever saying it out loud, and hearing someone further down the road put it that plainly gave me permission to take it seriously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That same day I had a long talk with Kip Chase, a Wabash alum in HR at Lilly who used to be based in Shanghai. As someone from China, I could have listened to him for hours. He walked me through how recruiting differs between China and the U.S., and what a company like Lilly is really looking for when it hires. It pulled the curtain back a little. I came away understanding that what gets you in the door is rarely the thing you spend the most time polishing on a resume. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the part I did not expect: I was already doing exactly what Josh described. My team and I spent the summer building\u00a0Trippit, an AI app that helps families plan trips together, and we pitched it to anyone who would listen. The most useful audience was the faculty in Notre Dame’s ESTEEM program, who we met after the Chicago leg of our trip. One professor, Michael Wicks, suggested we add a social feature for the group, almost like a\u00a0moms’\u00a0group chat. We worked it into our next demo that same week. That was the real lesson of the summer for me. An idea you defend stays the same. An idea you\u00a0open up\u00a0to feedback gets better, fast. Once\u00a0I felt that\u00a0happen a few times, I stopped being so precious about my own work.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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If I could pass anything along\u00a0to\u00a0next year’s guys, it would be small and practical. Ride in the vans instead of taking your own car, because honestly the conversations on the road are half of what you came for. Talk to every alum you can, even the ones who do nothing close to what you study, because Wabash men give their time freely and you have no idea where one conversation leads. And whatever feedback you get, use it while it still stings a little, not three weeks later once it has gone cold.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for me, I am holding onto Josh’s advice. I would rather keep using AI to build my own projects than slot into something routine, and walking through the finance firms in Chicago only made me more curious about quantitative finance as a path. The bigger thing I am taking with me is quieter than any single visit. I learned how to put something I made in front of people, listen without flinching, and then make it better. That habit is going to follow me into research and into whatever I try to build next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So to any future Wabash man reading this: even if business feels like someone else’s world, give the BIP a shot anyway. You will walk away with more than you came for. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I signed up for the Business Immersion Program (BIP) through the Center for Innovation, Business, and Entrepreneurship (CIBE), I figured it would be a little outside my lane. I am an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":195,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127,103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2026-summer-internships","category-cibe"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2026\/07\/image-10.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/195"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5156,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5153\/revisions\/5156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/summerinternships\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}