EDC Report for 2008-09

EDC Report for 2008-09

The Entrepreneurship Development Cell of Loyola College took a great leap forward this year and conducted many activities to spread entrepreneurship among students. The activities that were conducted were as follows.

Inauguration:
The inaugural session was held on --. Mr. Pandiarajan of MaFoi talked about how he became an entrepreneur and inspired many students. Also, a number of students joined the EDC.

B-Plan Writing Workshop:
On the 16th of December, Mr. R Murali of Unifi conducted a workshop in our college on how to write ‘Business Plans’- an essential step to be taken if you want to become an entrepreneur. It was very informative and a number of students benefited from it.

TiE Conference – Bangalore:
The TiE conference was held from 16th to 18th of December in Bangalore. It was an international conference to celebrate entrepreneurship and its various aspects. Prominent entrepreneurs such as Vijay Mallya and Azim premji came to share their experience and ideas. Two of our student – Pradeep Rajadas and Erick Irani had the rare previlige of being invited to attend the conference. They benefited a lot from the valuable experience and met many high profile businessmen.

Anna University Panel Discussion
On the 28th of January, some of our first year students attended a panel discussion held at Anna University between various speakers on the pros and sons of entrepreneurship.

Genesis 2009-IIT Madras
Some of the students of the Entrepreneurship development cell also attended Genesis 2009 hosted by IIT madras about Business Plan writing.Which had many prominent organizations and speakers.

Panel Discussion-NEN’s Hottest Startups-Chennai
Many of our students also attended a panel discussion with the finalists in Tata Nen’s hottest startups from Chennai, with speakers like Mr.Karthik from Evam, Mr.S.Nandakumar from Perfint and Uday Shankar from Ennovasys


Oxygen 09
This was the pinnacle of all EDC activities of the year. It was organized in collaboration with the enviro club. A four-day long celebration of entrepreneurship in collaboration with environment awareness, ‘oxygen 09’, the entrepreneurship week of Loyola College was a grand success. The activities were spread over four days from 2nd of March to 5th of march as follows.

Day 1:
Inauguration:
Presided by Justice Jyothimani and forest Minister M. Selvaraj. Mr. Jyothimani gave the inaugural address and the minister talked about the environment.

‘Tailor Made’
This was a series of department-specific talks given by entrepreneurs from various fields. There were totally 6 talks, 3 of them on day 1.

First talk was given by Mr. Venkatasubbarao of TSK and Co. He gave a useful insight into entrepreneurship.
Second talk was in the afternoon by Mr. Sunil, a.k.a. ‘Shoosha’ of Evam Productions. The audience was made up of mostly Vis. Comm. Students and he talked about Theatre and opportunities in the Media sector. It was fantastic.
Third and final talk of the day was on technology. Mr. Dorai Thodla is a fantastic speaker and presenter and showed us some unbelievable stuff that technology can do. This was followed by some mind blowing stats.


Day 2:
‘Tailor Made’
Fourth Talk was by Mr. Harihara of Mayuras infotech. He talked about business in his field and in the field of robotics.
Fifth talk –Mr. Maalolan Anand on ‘English Entrepreneurship’ took the audience by storm. We let him go on for more than 2 hours since it was amazing. The hall was packed. The students loved it.
Best Quote – ‘Your writings will be the eyes of the world’. He only quoted from some tamil proverb. Very inspirational- for a second even I thought of becoming a writer.
Sixth talk – Mr. Shrinivas of PPP infotech talked about translated literature and a bit about his business. He is a multi-faceted personality.


Day 3:

Greenpeace talk:
The world renowned environment protection agency – Greenpeace came to our college to do what they do best- spread environment awareness. They also conducted the environment quiz that got the crowd involved. That’s when Oxygen Compete started.

Open Coffee Club:
Mr. Suresh of RSK and Mr. Vaidi – founder of open coffee club. The first talked about entrepreneurship and the latter about green technology.

Oxygen Compete:
These are a bunch of competitions that occupied the last two days. The events included:
Business quiz, debate, junk art, case study, slogan and logo design, poster making, photo entrepreneurship, Rs. 50 challenge (which is quite interesting – students given Rs. 50 and given 24 hours to try and make maximum profit out of it).

Day 4:
adzap, debate finals, stock wars, what if, block and tackle, paper presentation, plan your budget, creative writing, street play, business plan writing.

Participation was great, the events got a bit delayed but that could be accepted in all culturals. We got a positive reponse from the students. Our own college students also participated.
Overall championship went to Vivekananda College. Second was SRCM (Sree Ramchandra College of Management which is under Sree Ramchandra University).

Valedictory:
Mr. Sameer Metha of Atlas Agency.
The final function- the valedictory where prizes were given out and gratitude was expressed to all the participants (and sponsors).

We (the organizers) worked very hard for it and were quite satisfied with the outcome. We worked against all the odds in the world and still went ahead with it. It was much better than last year’s and I would be audacious enough to say it was better than the e-weeks of most other colleges.


Career Fair:
On the 12th of March, three prominent entrepreneurs came to our college to interact with our students and to discuss the prospects of entrepreneurship in recent times.