In the fall of 2019, my team prepared and entered a pitch for the Hult Competition (required by honors seminar). I enjoyed this project because there were many new problems and solutions that we learned about while building something in a team competitive environment ($1,000,000,000 to win). Our team worked to solve the problem of a lack of fresh water supply for over a million people by 2030. We brainstormed, planned, and presented with so much passion and excitement. Using interdisciplinary methodology, we considered various perspectives into our production and its marketing. In order to dive deeper, we reach out to engineering students and business practitioners at StartUp's collaboration spaces. These interactions helped us to more confidently present and plan our pitch which involved planning distribution and development. I learned that there are so many people in your FIU network who are willing to help you from their area of expertise and influence. Faculty, students, and alumni are only an email away from collaboration. Multiple disciplines are what create interesting new fields of study. In graduate school, some problems require getting outside expertise. For example, when I develop algorithms for gene dataset, I will have no idea what the results could possibly mean till I consult a biologist, geneticist, or etc. Even after graduate school, I will continue to create meaningful solutions to problems that need interdisciplinary solutions.

Since I'm an active learner, I did my best in this project because I was able to have fun with my friends. If I'm working on a competitive project, it's a great stimulus for learning. My team would scour the internet for great content that would give our project a competitive edge and make it awesome. Reading and sharing those materials helped us learn what we needed to make the project valuable. In the initial project phase, the biggest problem we had to overcome was that we had no idea what we were going to do for the competition. Our project went over many iterations of prototypes and direction. We overcame this problem by continuously iterating until we just had to decide on the final direction. No matter how much time and emotion you put into a project, it can still be a failure. Even though the immediate project is a failure, you just have to keep moving forward. It's ok because judges couldn't care less. Our team didn't make it past the first round of the competition, but we learned that it was because our project wasn't innovative enough. I also learned to get the opinion of others to see if your idea is really groundbreaking because you can spend years on a project and not have anything spectacular to show for it. I'm proud of our work as a team and thankful for the help of everyone involved.