News
MIT Launch Club at Midwest Demo Day
By Parker’s MIT Launch Club President Desiree Shafaie ’19
This past weekend, the MIT Launch Club attended Midwest Demo Day. In our club, students form groups to create a startup and a product while taking an online MIT Launch course to learn about how to conduct their entrepreneurial endeavors.
At the Midwest Demo Day event, judges gathered at mHub to critique and evaluate student groups from all around the Midwest. Beginning at 9 a.m., students filed in excited and nervous for their pitches—they would be pitching their environmentally sustainable businesses, which they had been working on for months. The business ideas included sustainable dolls, a machine that retrieves waste from bodies of water and an app to help farmers. As representatives from Parker, freshmen JP Werneck Fraga, Ethan Butler-VanderLinden and Rohan Dhingra were led by senior Abhinav Goyal in pitching their company, Cospire, an alternative online classroom with the goal of student collaboration in mind. While the team did not realize their pitch had to follow the theme of environmental sustainability, presenting served as good experience for the freshmen, as it introduced them to the business environment and allowed them to speak in front of other aspiring entrepreneurs.
Through close observation, members of the MIT Launch Club have been able to hone ideas and gain inspiration from fellow high school entrepreneurs who attended the LaunchX event. Having witnessed varying creative processes from each group, the MIT Launch club was able to glimpse a brighter future—one in which human beings put a higher value on sustainable development and cultural education.
Francis W. Parker School educates students to think and act with empathy, courage and clarity as responsible citizens and leaders in a diverse democratic society and global community.