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Over the summer, Michelle Zhuang and Ryan Bott, both students at AISG, and JuHo Seo, who attends the Shanghai American School Puxi, participated in the PolyU Innovation and Entrepreneurship Global Student Challenge at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong and were awarded first place.
According to Ryan, the PolyU Global Student Challenge “is a global challenge where you have to come up with a business idea as entrepreneurs. You then have to write a business plan and, if you do make it to the top 20, you travel to Hong Kong and present your idea in front of the other groups as well as highly esteemed university professors and company managers and owners.”
For the challenge, Michelle, Ryan and JuHo came up and wrote a business plan called WebEd. According to Ryan, WebEd or Webinar Education is a tutoring service using WeChat that they created.
Michelle first heard of the challenge from an email sent to the grade 10 and 11 students by Ms. Erica. Ryan first heard of it from his friend Juho in Shanghai. He explained how he went onto the main website and followed the specific requirements and guidelines. The rest is up to the team to come up and write a business plan.
According to Ryan, Michelle and Juho, the challenge wasn’t easy. They’ve spent a lot of time and hard work on it and their win is a reflector of that. Michelle said, “We put in as much effort as we could, often working up until late nights to 3 a.m. We didn’t give up in the face of so many difficulties and persisted until the end. We also went around asking a lot of people for their advice and input – including our parents, Economics teachers, executive officers in companies, public organizations, and so on. We tried to utilize every possible resource we could to broaden and deepen our knowledge revolving around our idea, which helped us to easily respond to the questions that the judges raised during the competition.” Ryan also mentioned that, “Our team was unique because we had two members from Guangzhou and one member from Shanghai, whereas most, if not all teams, had members from the same region. This made it so that it was difficult to work together and communicate.”
With all the hard work they endured, their first place is an incredible award. Michelle said, “Oh my god, incredible. To be honest, I was surprised to be even shortlisted by the competition— that is, being one of the 20 teams that were chosen out of over a hundred high school teams. So doubtlessly, I was very surprised to get the first place. But I think it is also very rewarding. Our team has put in immense effort in completing this challenge, and I am so glad that it paid off well.” Ryan also said, “Definitely was not expecting it. Every group had their own strengths and honestly it was very competitive.”
The PolyU Global Student Challenge may have been hard, but it had its merits. Besides getting first place, Michelle and Ryan both stated that the best part was meeting people from all over the world and meeting the judges of the competitions, who were all successful individuals from various industries. Michelle commented that “I was able to meet a lot of people with amazing talents, and get to speak with professionals in the business world and see how their insights on our ideas are like. It is not easy for one to go up to the head of a commercial bank and ask about the financial sustainability of a particular business plan when one is trying to start a new business— but with the PolyU challenge, this became possible.”
When asked if they would recommend this challenge, Michelle and Ryan both replied yes. Michelle said “Even if you’re not sure whether you’re able to do it or not— just try it. Who knows what will happen? I mean, our team put together the business plan under a week when I was in APAC Dance and MUN and all of us were in different cities. Really, nothing is impossible.”
If you would like to read more about our student’s achievements over the summer, click here for more.
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