On & Off Campus Blog: Beyond The Map – More Than a Project
By: Hailey Zhao ’28
At the beginning of this school year, my friend group and I decided to take part in the Global Entrepreneurship Challenge (GEC). The GEC allows students to create real-life solutions to pressing local issues while aligning with global objectives and creates chances to work with students from around the world collaboratively. It also gives students an opportunity to gain impactful insights on experienced speakers and panels when presenting their finished work at a Global Summit.
My four friends, Sabrine Said, Sydney Xu, Syrah Gill, Zoe Pincus, and I started off by creating a personalized blog, introducing ourselves and sharing why we wanted to build a solution based on a particular topic. We chose a topic to help minorities connect with each other to gain more experience and opportunity. Additionally, we attended multiple zoom meetings and shared our ideas with many schools around the world and the hosts of this challenge.
The times where we had to attend meetings, we would often spend our Tuesday mornings bright and early huddled around a small table with two laptops (one for the zoom call, and the other for notes) placed side by side. Our seats would be crammed together in a tiny library study room or the conference rooms near the Commons. Although each of us had gotten minimal amounts of sleep the night before, we had all tried our best to wake up and participate with a cheerful attitude.
Soon, our plastered-on grins turned into authentic smiles and laughter as we realized how much fun we were having. In addition to spending time with the other schools and learning about their interesting topics, we spent more time together as a friend group ourselves and worked together on a project that inspired us all.
Because our schedules are all so different, we realized that our friend group doesn’t really get to spend much time together at school. Many of us only share one or two blocks together, and we all eat lunch at different times. We all attend different clubs during CAB and have varying sports commitments after school. These schedule differences and time availability made it extremely hard to keep up on each other’s ideas and stay on the same page about the project.
Nevertheless, I am still extremely proud of our friend group for always making our ideas work out in the end, even though it was hard for all of us to squeeze time into drafting our plans and completing our tasks, having often procrastinated or requested an extension of deadlines by a couple days. By deciding to join in on this entrepreneurship challenge and crafting ideas valuable to each and every one of us, we learned how well our thoughts pieced together and how well we worked together creating a non-profit website for people that relate to our situations.
As we drafted more thoughts, we created Beyond The Map, a website where people who face challenges as a minority can speak openly, feel understood, and know they aren’t alone. Although it’s not fully finished and is being constantly updated, Beyond The Map holds many available resources to the public such as chat boxes, messaging functions, advice columns, and even potential job offerings. We even created an Instagram page to promote the website to our community, hoping to expand insights and viewers.
I am very much looking forward to the progress we will make together as a team, especially when showcasing our work at the Global Summit during spring in New York. I have a lot of faith in our ideas, creativity, and most importantly the drive of willingness to help the people around us, having experienced similar situations and challenges ourselves as minorities.
I hope our voices will be heard even better after curating a more complete and updated version of our website, and that we not only accomplish the ideas we have in mind, but actually create a realistic solution that can help the people around us in need. I am so excited to see where this challenge takes us by helping us gain a better viewpoint of the world and our communities. This experience has enhanced our knowledge on all aspects of entrepreneurship, and in the process also tied us closer together as a friend group.
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