Life Changing Experience at MIT LaunchX

A month ago, I flew to Boston Massachusetts to attend LaunchX Summer Program at MIT. LaunchX summer program taps into the potential of ambitious high school students, supporting them through the process of launching an actual startup.

I had four main objectives for this program: firstly, to engage and collaborate with other youths from diverse communities as we challenge ourselves and furnish creativity that impacts the world at large. Secondly, to build a viable startup that could potentially turn into a successful business and therefore create impact. Thirdly, to meet new people and create new connections –I am always fascinated to hear new ideas and perspectives. I was also very eager to meet other students who are passionate about entrepreneurship like I do and lastly, to further hone my leadership and entrepreneurial skills. And now reflecting back I think I have had tremendous accomplishments and experiences while at MIT LaunchX.

Attending this summer program has really impacted me not only as an entrepreneur but also as an individual. Everyone in the program had a unique story about themselves and how they drive changes in their home countries, listening to their stories have really inspired me. I was surrounded with brilliant people and fortunately enough we all almost had the same vision, to change people’s lives and if not changing it completely then at least improving it. If someone was to ask one Lesson that I have learnt from this amazing community at LaunchX, the answer would be true entrepreneurs are those who believe that Entrepreneurship is a learning process. This is because I have learnt valuable lessons from my peers who are always eager and passionate to learn more things about entrepreneurship, either theoretically through the materials taught in the classroom or practically through building our companies.

I have also co-founded a company with other three high school students. We went through a very process to identify a need that small and medium tech-companies using training data to develop or incorporate Artificial intelligence in their businesses have. We did customer research which enabled us to fully understand the problem from these businesses perspectives and actually got suggestions from their end on how we could be of help. And brainstorming we came up with a solution which is NOTITIA, a startup that sought to make training data more accessible to businesses by crowdsourcing the data from the public through a mobile Application and therefore get large datasets that will cater for the needs of these tech companies.

I also got the chance to explore the city of Boston and some of the world’s leading universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University.

Lastly, all I can say is that I would never trade this four-week experience for anything. This has been the best summer of my life. (Hearts)

Hearts again*