Katalyst has joined hands with Launch U with the mission to help and empower high school seniors pursue their dreams of college education. With this partnership with Launch U, we hope to contribute to the learning process of high school seniors and provide insights and an opportunity to experience various facets of running a business (technology, operations, recruitment, etc.). We hope that with this experience they will be able to select a major and work toward a passion in college.
Taking our initial steps toward this, we invited students from Launch U to our office premises to spend a day with different teams at work. The idea behind this was for them to have an overview of corporate culture and the business at large. These students are academically brilliant and have applied to some very well-known schools and universities for majors in Business, Entrepreneurship, and Medicine. John Restrepo, Jeffy Thomas, Usha Sanjay, Wayne Ma, Natalie Dolan, and Heloisa Ameneiro volunteered to spend their day in their work spaces, helping these students gain an insight into the different functions of our Business.
The students were then split into groups to talk to the Sales, Marketing, IT, Finance and Supply Chain teams. The discussions were interactive and engaging. The day ended with some pizza at a local pizzeria. We’ve had students write to us to tell us how enriching this experience of learning about the different areas of business was for them. One of them wrote, “This opportunity has allowed me to see that business is something that I actually want to study in college”. Most students said that they enjoyed “meeting and talking with the CEO”.
Our hope is to have some of these students come back for an in-depth session with the team of their choice. Hopefully, during the course of the next two quarters, they will be able to build a relationship with our teams and leverage this network to build towards their career opportunities in the future.
Watch out for more updates on our partnership with Launch U here. Launch U helps connect young professionals with high achieving urban scholars to help expose them to college life and career opportunities and provide general guidance during their senior year of high school. To learn more about Launch U please visit www.launchu.org
