Southern California is currently experiencing a wonderful and rare “superbloom” of flowers. Experts say that this spring, everything has “just been growing, growing, growing.” Spark SC has had a wonderful bloom too! From kicking off TechLA Fellows, our first summer fellowship program for interns at our partner startups, to piloting our Project Launch workshops for inner-city high school students, our impact continues to grow. Here’s a peek at a few of our buds.

Spark SC has been the foundation of my time in college, and also some of the best collection of friends I've ever made. For the past three years I've worked as a committee member on projects like Tech.LA Fellows, Venture Studios, Unite, and Ideas to Impact. I also had the great opportunity to lead a committee myself, and to then take the leap onto the leadership team as co-President.

State of Spark: Spring 2017

Spark SC is the student-run entrepreneurial hub at the University of Southern California. So, what have we been up to this semester?

Read on Medium →

Tech.LA Fellows

Tech.LA Fellow’s 10-week Summer Fellowship gives highly motivated students in design, engineering, and business a paid internship with a Los Angeles startup. The impetus for starting this project began when several Spark members had gone through the KPCB Fellows recruitment cycle and really appreciated what they built up north, but were thoroughly unimpressed by what Los Angeles had to offer, in regard to a community of interns.

So, we gathered a small group of Los Angeles startups, all in line with our mission of creating a tighter ecosystem of young tech talent in LA, and opened our application. That first year alone we received over 300 applications for just a handful of spots. In our second iteration (last summer), we received nearly 600 applications and are deep into our third iteration of the fellowship program today.

If you're interested in applying to the Fellowship program for the summer of 2019, keep an eye on our website, tech.la.

Unite Conference

In late 2016, a Spark committee formed with the concept of bringing together different entrepreneurial orgs from around the country to share ideas and learn from one another. This culminated in a 2-day conference at Google's San Francisco Headquarters over the summer of 2017.

Ideas to Impact

Ideas to Impact (now Innovating for the Refugee Crisis), which ran in 2017, was the first student-led course at the University of Southern California. Inspired by design-thinking principles from companies like IDEO, and by the idea that students teaching students is a novel way to connect in the classroom, a small group of Spark SC students pushed the Viterbi School of Engineering to champion the course.

There's one great thing about Spark I've yet to mention: it changes EVERY YEAR... turnover is part of the beauty of a student organization. While I and many of the people who worked on some of the initiatives above may have already graduated, I urge you, if you're interested, to continue to support what's going on in Spark.

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More Spark SC projects: