Oct. 8 at 2 p.m. the Chinese Students & Scholars Association will host a University of Wyoming Entrepreneurship Summit and celebrate traditional Chinese “Mid-Autumn Festival.”
UWCSSA invites students, professors, staff and all Laramie dwellers to the Union Ballroom to celebrate traditional Chinese “Mid-Autumn Festival.” This year the annual “Mid-Autumn Festival” at UW is taking a new form. CSSA is dedicated to USA-China relations and aim to discuss innovations and entrepreneurship. During the summit guests from different universities and companies all across the country will have the opportunity to share their experience in business and modernization.
“This festival has two aims,” said Wenyang Lu, president of UWCSSA. “The first one is the promotion of friendship between the US and China. It will allow UW students and the Laramie community to learn more about Chinese students, their attitudes for the future and recent studies.”
Traditionally, during the “Mid-Autumn Festival,” people in China meet their families and gather at dinner with their beloved. Previously, UWCSSA celebrated this event in the form of cultural sharing with traditional dances, songs and Chinese cuisine.
This year guests will have the chance to taste mooncake, a sweet and traditional dish, at the festival. The cultural dish was chosen to symbolize students missing their families, being far away. At the conclusion of the summit UWCSSA will entertain its guests and audience with dinner filled with typical Chinese tastes and smells.
The main purpose of the festival this year is a business summit. Lu said he expects this festival to become a business platform for young entrepreneurs.
“In the modern society of 21st century there are a lot of people who think they don’t want to work for someone. They want to build their own business in the future,” Lu said. “So, they have a lot of questions: what to start with and how things work in business.”
“People have great ideas,” Lu said. “Some of them even have great new products, but the problem is that they don’t know how everything works; for example, how to pay check and venture capital. We provide them with a platform to build these connections with guests.”
Guests of the festival will have a chance to attend lectures by specialists from UW College of Business, a capital analyst, a guest from Carnegie Mellon University, a business counselor from Wyoming Technology Business Center and four young entrepreneurs.
Lu believes this summit will inspire young people who want to establish their own business in the future or that already have ideas for start-ups.
“Young people will meet our guests, experienced in entrepreneurship, to listen to their lectures. And then they will think that if someone else could start his own business and succeeded, then they can do it, too,” he says. “They will know how to build their own team, make their own product, and enlarge their capitals. It is the way we want to help the UW community.”
“We can move further, raise some funding. We could invite investors from not only Laramie, but Cheyenne and Denver. It could be a state-wide, even national-wide project,” says Lu. “In future we would like to have enough resources to build our own incubator, set our own competition for start-up owners, and give them money and other resources to start their own business.”
UWCSSA looks forward to making the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit an annual event.
