Miami University students who are part of the Entrepreneurship Living Learning Community in Dennison Hall spent last weekend learning new skills and more about themselves.

Nearly 200 students signed up for the LLC Startup Weekend, where teams worked over two days to ideate, validate, and present a startup business. It’s the first year for the competition exclusively for LLC members, which mostly mirrors the annual Techstars Startup Weekend that is open to all Miami students.

“This is a chance to expand on what we've been doing with the main Startup Weekend for the last several years, to take a step back with a group of students figuring out things like ‘How do we even work together as a team? How do we identify a problem we care about?’” associate lecturer Geoff Zoeckler explained. “It moves things upstream a little bit further and allows a first semester freshman to explore and understand a little bit more.”

The event, taking place early in the students’ first semester of college, is less about winning than being a platform for their growth.

“It's mostly about self-development, getting them to understand what they're capable of, what entrepreneurship means to them, what actually lights them up, gets them excited, and identify where they might want to go as they keep going in their college career using those skills,” Zoeckler said.

Lucas Cahill, a first-year Economics and Entrepreneurship major, said his group, comprised of a random selection of students by organizers ahead of time, came together quickly and successfully.

“The people in the group matter a lot. The discipline of people, the hard work that they put in, and the teamwork. And I would say this group, we got really lucky. We got really lucky. The team was really solid,”

Cahill’s team, Sip Safe, which ideated a straw that will alert someone if a drink has been has had a drug put in it, won first place and $5,000, part of a $10,000 prize pool shared by the top six teams.

But the money isn’t all the team is taking from the weekend.

“I think what I learned about myself is that I really like collaborating with others and putting together different ideas,” first-year Strategic Communication major Halle Paretzkin said. “I think that I found more of a passion for creating something new and presenting that idea to a group of other people.”

“I learned that you need to be able to work off of your groupmates, and you need to be able to pivot when things go wrong. Not to stick too much to one idea but be able to use feedback to change things and think through ideas, see the flaws, see the failures early on so you can try to troubleshoot,” first-year Marketing major Kate Russell said.

Zoeckler said the main goal of the weekend is to give students that sort of knowledge and confidence in themselves as they start their college careers.

“it's hard to know until you try, and so everyone who is here is taking the mindset of ‘I'm going to try things and I'm going to figure stuff out,’ and I think they're going to find that to be a huge step forward as they carry this into any of their majors.”