Sudbury high school students gain business skills

High school students from all four school boards in Greater Sudbury gathered at Laurentian University on Friday for a business challenge.

Called the Startup Summit Business Challenge, the event is organized by Laurentian’s business student council.

Students were put into teams of five and paired with a student mentor from Laurentian. Teams had seven minutes to present their ideas to a panel of judges. Six teams presented in English and one presented in French.

“We have seven high schools from Greater Sudbury who are joining us at Laurentian University for a one-day business competition,” said Emily Davidge, student council president.

“This year we’ve gone with a theme of luxury. So, luxury food, luxury cars, luxury sports, homes, anything like that. So the cases are really fun this year.”

Paul Petitclerc, a third-year Laurentian student in the business administration program focusing on finance, was mentoring for the first time.

“I’m just there to make sure they’re on the right track,” Petitclerc said.

Make themselves heard

“I think my biggest piece of advice was to loosen up when they present and not be stiff and mumble -- to really make themselves heard and be as vocal as they can and freestyle almost, too.”

Petitclerc said the experience is valuable for high school students.

“When I was in high school, we didn’t have this,” he said.

“It really gives the students a better idea of what business is so that they’re not going into the business program blindly.”

Emily Rocha, Grade 12 student at St. Benedict Catholic School, along with her team, presented a product pitch for Indigenous jewelry called Lawe Lavishes.

“It was about Indigenous jewelry and how we were going to make an approach that allowed us to give back to the Indigenous communities using art,” Rocha said.

“The artists would make the jewelry so that it could reflect on their teachings and their cultures.”

While she was nervous to present in front of the large group, she learned the importance of perseverance.

“I learned that even when you’re nervous, you still have to just like, just do it. You just got go,” Rocha said.

Future business leaders

“I learned that you should definitely watch your time whenever you’re presenting, because the time does go by pretty quickly, even when you don’t think it does.”

Davidge said a goal of the summit is to give future business leaders some real-world experience.

“It’s just to get them comfortable performing business proposals,” she said.

“In the series, we also added a quantitative analysis … There’s more numbers involved to kind of get them comfortable presenting some numbers in front of audiences.”

Davidge said she’d love for the summit to grow in the future by adding more schools and more students. She said she’d like it to become a two-day event to make it more competitive.

“We filled the room today, so maybe even if we can welcome some more schools to campus next year, we’d have to choose a different venue,” she said.

“But the more the merrier.”