A new hope

New year, new hopes and so far so good. We set out some goals for ourselves this year to stay on top of things and to help keep us motivated. We made targets for our roles at Robogals and for StemEd like number of schools, numbers of students, basically our KPIs for the year. One of which is to actually make a post on this blog every fortnight so look forward to that.

More importantly though, the new year is a time to reflect on the previous year, where we went wrong and how we could do better. Last year was a crazy year for both Sing and me. We met each other in August and only became friends in September/October. Between the two of us, we were in at least 5 different countries last year. Sing spent the majority of the year not in Australia. I started a new uni course. Sing had to write-off his car. I helped fix aircraft parts at the airport. To say it was a busy year is an understatement. We lost hours of sleep, gained a few kilos from all the junk food we ate during the countless hours spent cramming during exam period and lost some marks but it was all worth it. Would not change a second of it.

But moving ahead there are some things we would like to do better like have a normal sleeping pattern, eating at regular hours, y’know the usual things that keep a person healthy. Next year is Sing’s final year so he wants to knuckle down, get the best final year project and graduate with honours. I want to get back to my D/HD average because I stopped trying a long time ago and I realised it’s a bad way of living.

I’m both terrified and excited about next year because we’re going to be super busy with StemEd, Robogals, uni, Unmanned Aerial System team, final year projects but we’ve decided to use the word excited instead of terrified to make things sound more exciting so I’m both excited and excited.

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Kellen

Sydney trip

When the year was over, I really needed a break from life. So we decided to go on a ‘yoloday’ to Sydney for 5 days. Needless to say, it was an amazing 5 days. We went from camping in the Blue Mountains to getting lost in China Town without Google Maps (harder than you think lolol)

When we arrived in Sydney with our backpacks, we had an idea of where we’re going but no plan. We purchased a tent from Kmart the day before for $15 and tested it out in a park, we bought food from Coles for dinner (decided to make Burgers) before making the trek out to Blue Mountains. Being the optimistic people we are, we thought there would be a public BBQ area that we can use, turns out there wasn’t so we had to collect wood and start a camp fire to cooked our burgers and eggs. Huge success! Even managed to toast our buns.

The weather was horrible throughout the Sydney trip as it was raining everyday we were there, this didn’t stop us though. On the second day, we decided to go explore The Three Sisters, so we ended up hiking around the area in pouring rain. We were literally up in the clouds! But it was totally worth it because we made it to the top of one of The Three Sisters and crossed a bridge to the second one.

That night we decided to set up a tent in the rain and camp out again because the first night was so successful. Worst sleep ever… We ended up sleeping in our cars after lol

All the other days, we just went around trying out the infamous Sydney freak shakes. We gained weight…

Honuorable mention to a Thai restaurant called Chat Thai, amazing Thai food and we found out about it on Google Maps searching ‘Thai restaurants near me’. Best feast was at Food Craft, best burgers ever! Best milkshake at XS Expresso. Dat fondu tho..

Sydney summary: we ate, we hiked, we camped, and did a lot of stupid shit. Was fun, would do again/10

Sing

Our Next Target

Pitch night was done and dusted but we weren’t. The Tuesday night before pitch night we went to the RMIT Global Futures Forum because between preparing for pitch night and finishing uni assignments, we had all the time in the world.

It turned out to be quite interesting and we met quite an interesting bunch of people. One of which was a guy called Aun from Foundation for Young Australians (FYA). As it was the night before pitch night, Sing and I were using every opportunity to practice our elevator pitch and get our idea out there. Aun happened to be one of our unsuspecting audiences. We pitched and he told us about a program FYA was running with PwC in regards to STEM education and said our idea would be perfect for it. Applications opened for PwC’s 21st Century Minds Accelerator Program, we read all of the information and that became our next target.

We met up with Aun and another person from FYA called Hayley and they told us more about the program and we just wanted to do it even more. Unfortunately this was during our exam period so we decided to complete the application after we had completed our exams so we could properly focus on the application during the week before the closing date. LOLJK we are very good at procrastinating so instead of studying (sometimes) we downloaded the application forms and started to brainstorm some responses.

So…Sing and I aren’t exactly the most articulate people. These were some of our first draft responses after hours of studying

We fixed our answers with help from Aun (champion) and sent our application through. We got a reply a couple days ago and unfortunately, sometimes you just miss the target. That’s okay though because it means that there are some incredible STEM initiatives out there and we’re excited that other people are excited about STEM too. We just need to get StemEd to that level now.

Kellen

The road less travelled

The road less travelled…because it was 8km of walking.

So I arrived in Japan a couple weeks ago and it turns out I have a hard time letting my responsibilities go. This seems like a good trait but not really. For the first few days I was constantly checking my emails and making sure everything was ok because I like my tasks being done a certain way (my way). Anyway I got pretty annoying and received some sage advice from Sing.

SO, I planned Kyoto in a day. Now let me give you some sage advice, don’t do Kyoto in a day. I mean you can, I did, but don’t.

I wanted to hit up all the major Kyoto sights and then some so this is what my route ended up looking like mapzzz route

Continue reading “The road less travelled” →

Pitch Night Part 2: The End

Our turn came, we pitched our idea to the judges and in the end we got an honourable mention. We were pretty disappointed in our results (Kellen more than me lol), but as they say, can’t win them all Charlie Brown. Congratulations to Sam and Chad though, we really hope their idea goes far.

Screen Shot 2015-12-04 at 3.25.32 PM — Time to shine! (credit @teknover)

After that night, we had a long discussion about what we wanted and how we both see StemEd in the future. At the end of the day, we both decided to pursue it to the very end, whatever that means.

Sing

This experience was life changing, to say the least. To be honest, Sing and I really didn’t expect anything more than a good story at the end of all this and maybe to help some people. Instead, we found a future. It has truly taught us so much, words cannot describe. We’d like to thank Rahul (who will never be able to rid himself of us), Leon (the cool-lame dad) and Monash SEED. ily 5eva.

Kellen

Read Pitch Night Part 1: The Final Countdown
Read Weeks 4 and 5: StemEd
Read Week 3: Warm
Read Week 2: 1000 Dollars and a Bike
Read Week 1: Feels Week
Read the Beginning

Pitch Night Part 1: The Final Countdown

So the final week, Week 5, of the incubator program was on Saturday 17 October. Pitch night was four days later on Wednesday 21 October. Like the good uni students we are, we left everything to the last minute but not really because we were given that many days notice zzz

By the final week we had done a few problem interviews, however Rahul told us we hadn’t done enough. We also needed to create some traction for our idea to really impress the judges so we set out on a mission.

Kellen

Tuesday, day before pitch night, was HECTIC. We managed to line up 5 more teachers to interview to get some more market validation to put in our pitch. Lets just say it was a long day….

Our schedule:
9:00 Mentone Girls Secondary College
10:15 Toorak College
12:00 Mentone Girls (again)
1:30 Ringwood North Primary School
3:10 Sacred Heart Seconadry

I drove around 200km to get interviews with teachers. After that, we still had to work on making our pitch deck and practice our pitch. Lets also just say it was a long night….

Sing Continue reading “Pitch Night Part 1: The Final Countdown” →

Weeks 4 and 5: StemEd

These were the weeks where we really got stuck into our idea. We came up with market hypothesis, got ready to go interview our target markets, got a crash course in how to pitch, got pitch advice from a legend called Nathan (amazing pitcher, learnt so much thxoxo). The 5 week program was about to end, and it really felt like it was all coming together. Our idea was actually achievable if we put in all our efforts.

It was at this time we were told to come up with a name. We had been putting this off for a long time because we both knew the name is a major selling point for any business and we also wanted a memorable name. Until that point, this is what the folder on my computer was called:

folder lol

We threw some ideas around but they were all pretty silly (forgot them now). We really wanted the word STEM in the name and racked our brain for days until I suggested stemmed and then Sing was like “yeah… Stemed, like Stem Education”. We were both a bit like lol but it kind of worked so that’s how we got the name StemEd. We love it now though. Logo-wise, we had the idea of a blossoming plant, so we went with a little pot-plant.

Kellen

Read Week 3: Warm
Read Week 2: 1000 Dollars and a Bike
Read Week 1: Feels Week
Read the Beginning

Week 3: Warm

This was the week where this idea of ours started to become real. Our initial plan was basically to somehow get schools to do their own hands on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs. The idea came during our time being a part of an amazing organisation called Robogals. However being uni students our time is very limited and it’s not always easy for us to go out to schools and run the programs ourselves so we want to be able to give schools the resources to run similar programs themselves and to encourage all of STEM instead of just engineering.

Rahul sat down with us to establish our core purpose and core values of why we want to do this and what was important to us. Rahul loved to do scenarios and what if’s, so this time he made us picture ourselves in a movie where it was about a world without STEM. He asked us: How did it look? What is everyone like? Who is the main character of this movie? How would this movie progress? How will it end? It was a surprisingly hard task for us and we just kept shooting out words that didn’t actually mean anything. The words warm, curious, discover, STEM were thrown out quite often, not to mention a lot of weird looks at each other…

After about 30 minutes of back and fourth word vomit and questioning everything we said, Rahul, the master wordsmith, helped us put all our words into a sentence which summarises perfectly what we’re hoping to achieve out of this and is our core purpose today:

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“To live in a world that is forever curious and everyone gets to experience the joy of discovery”

Sing

Read Week 2: 1000 Dollars and a Bike
Read Week 1: Feels Week
Read the Beginning

Week 2: 1000 Dollars and a Bike

This was the week I attended my first session, and honestly, very low expectations in what I would get out of it since we were still going with Kellen’s homeless survival kit idea (I’m just along for the ride at this point)

In the session, we were learning how to use the Business Model Canvas, and Rahul gave us some scenarios for practice, one of them being a thousand dollars and a bike as resources. The funny thing is that we got our blog name from this session. (Long story on why this stuck out to us, but it’s a story for another time)

At the end of the session, we were talking to Rahul and getting to know him and we started talking about this other business idea we had (which stemmed into the current one we have now), he asked us “why aren’t you doing this instead?”. We thought to ourselves, why aren’t we doing this instead? This actually wasn’t a bad idea since we’ve now found something we’re both passionate about and it’s our area of “speciality”. So now we’re both on the same train of thought instead of Kellen being on the train alone, and I, following along in my car….lol

It was also in this session we met another person named Leon. We told him about our idea and he was telling us what he did etc. you know.. the usual. We got to the topic of discussing names for some reason and we were like to him “what do you think Kellen looks like?”. Leon said “something like a crab”, which is funny because this pose is what she does all the time… From them on, we knew that we’d get along just fine.

Honestly wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for this program, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

Sing

Read Week 1: Feels Week
Read the Beginning

Week 1: Feels Week

Sing was busy for the first session so I had to go it alone and yeah, I was pretty awkward. Awkwardly sat by myself, awkwardly introduced myself to the other participants, promptly forgot the names of the other participants.

The teams were introduced to Rahul who would be running the program and mentoring us. For the first session he got us to answer the most feels questions like “At the end of your life how do you want people to remember you by, basically write the eulogy you would want given at your funeral”.

This was me the entire time cd3er

I didn’t realise it then but this session and my answers to these questions were probably the most important part of this entire journey but that’s for next time!

Kellen

Read the Beginning