All our Apprentices work hard and do great stuff. Below is an example of one of the end of year reports from Charlotte Chang.
Introduction
My name is Charlotte Chang and I am currently a second-year Trustee Scholar (full tuition
scholarship) at the University of Southern California (USC) studying ‘Arts, Technology and the
Business of Innovation’, which is a Bachelor of Science degree combining design, engineering
and entrepreneurship. This is my fourth annual WCSIM report detailing the engineering and
entrepreneurship-related activities I have explored over the past year.
Startup Endeavours
Over the course of my first year at university, my team developed Opal, a social travel app that
makes group trip planning easy. With Opal, we entered the New Venture Seed Competition
(USC’s largest pitching competition) and the IYA Venture Showcase. However, after realising
that the percentage of people downloading apps was decreasing year on year, we decided to pivot
to Jade.
Jade is your text-based AI best friend that helps college students find adventure spots most suited
to their preferences. After launching our MVP on campus, we grew from 0 to 500 users through
guerilla marketing tactics, such as passing out candy with Jade’s phone number attached to
students in our library at 2am.
Then, we came across two businesses that also wanted to build their own SMS systems to
increase customer retention by helping users change their online subscriptions more easily, or
retrieve information faster. Thus, my team became obsessed with AI agents and pivoted to
creating a system (knox) that enables businesses to build their own SMS AI agents simply by
texting. Recently, my team won a $3000 innovation grant from the Iovine and Young Academy
at USC to help fund the further development of our project.
Hackathons/Pitch Competitions
Curious to explore the engineering behind hardware projects, my team pitched our portable
device, Caire, that leverages near-infrared technology to quantify hair damage to the L’Oréal
Brandstorm innovation competition. During USC’s internal round of the competition, my team
came first out of nine teams, winning $1000.
In the spirit of building physical projects and trying new experiences, I participated in two
hackathons this year. First, my friends and I competed in HackUPC (the biggest hackathon in
Spain hosted in Barcelona) before the start of summer, where we developed a smart, haptic alarm
called WompWomp that is meant to wake you up on the first try. We ended up pitching in the
Final Demo of the Top 5 teams and were interviewed on Spanish national TV. Throughout
summer, we took part in buildspace, a six-week, online “incubator” to further refine our product.