UIC MBA Chicago Entrepreneur Blog Past, present, and future plans in the life of an entrepreneur and former Chicago UIC MBA student.

Here’s some updates on the MBA program at UIC from the dean Stefanie Lenway:

The following are a sampling of some of the CBA’s outstanding achievements from the past few months.

• Entrepreneur magazine and The Princeton Review named our graduate entrepreneurship program sixth in the nation.

• Crain’s Chicago Business ranked the Liautaud MBA program fourth on its annual list of the area’s AACSB-accredited MBA programs.

• Liautaud MBA alumna Caralynn Nowinski-Chenoweth, the co-founder and acting CEO of Sanogene Therapeutics Inc., was named to the 2008 Crain’s Chicago Business “40 under 40” list, which is an annual snapshot “of the area’s up-and-comers from a wide range of industries.” In addition to this honor, Sanogene obtained the exclusive license to the worldwide patent for its core technology, received a strategic equity investment from Cato BioVentures, and entered into a partnership with Cato Research Ltd.

• Alter EatGo, founded by Eric Meredith ‘94, won the 2008 City Treasurer’s Business Plan Competition. This is the second consecutive year a business founded by a CBA alumnus took first place in the competition. (Sanogene Therapeutics won in 2007).

• The Crain’s Chicago Business list of Who’s Who in the Chicago business community featured several CBA alumni.

• The College of Business Administration received an “Above and Beyond” award from Junior Achievement in recognition of its efforts to assist the organization in providing important economic educational programs to young people in grades K-12. Last year, CBA student volunteers reached more than 8,600 students throughout the Chicagoland area, which represented a 277 percent increase in JA volunteer support from the previous year’s commitment.

It’s nice to see that the many people in the program are doing more than just classwork.  I’d like to get involved with more organizations, community services, and competitions in the new year.

Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud

Lately, I’ve been doing some research on the world water crisis. Did you know that almost 6000 people die EVERY DAY from drinking contaminated water? Most of these being children. This just blows my mind! That’s over 2 million people a year (mostly children) that will never get to grow up, get a job, have children, drive a car, enjoy life…

As I started to do some research, there were two very interesting products that I found that would help this situation tremendously. Both are low-cost, simple, and can potentially help millions of people.

Device #1 - WaterCone - Changing saltwater to freshwater

I’m so surprised that a solution could be so simple. Here’s how it works.

Turning saltwater into Freshwater

You pour saltwater into a pan. You place the WaterCone over the pan with the cap closed. Place it out into the sun and let the sun heat up the water. Once it starts evaporating, the condensation will drip back down but the cone side is shaped like a “U” and traps the water in. In 24 hours, you get fresh water to drink! Here are some more detailed pictures:

Pour salt water into the pan

Place the cone on top of pan and place in the sun

Water is trapped in the cone and ready to drink in 24 hours!

Absolutely simple and amazing! Once released, it’s suppose to be around $25.

Device #2 LifeStraw - the ability to drink contaminated water

LifeStraw personal is a device that basically works as a straw with filters that allows you to drink contaminated water safely. LifeStraw Personal kills 99.9999% of waterborne bacteria and 98.5% of viruses.

Sip through the straw to drink clean water

This device cost about $3 to make and is in production already. It purifies 700 Liters of water which is enough for one person for one year. The filters in the straw remove viruses, bacteria, and make the water taste better!

LifeStraw Family is a larger version of the LifeStraw and allows should be able to provide drinking water to a whole family for 2-3 years.

LifeStraw for the whole family!

Take a look at this youtube link in which CEO of LifeStraw drinks water mixed with cow crap. Amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycEnu9p1GPE

Conclusion:

It’s nice to see that simple devices are being created and distributed that will help the world water crisis. I’d like to research these products more and find out how I can get more involved.

Posted under Water Crisis

Congratulations to me for buying my first property.  It’s a nice feeling to know that I own my own little piece of the world.  My initial goal was to purchase a property two years ago but I’m glad I purchased it now because the timing works out well since prices are the lowest I’ve seen in a long time.  I’ll go through the process of buying a house for some of the other first time home buyers.  As a warning, I purchased the house through ForSaleByOwner and not through traditional real estate agents.

Step 1- In addition to having your real estate agent search for properties, you should be actively looking on sites such as Dreamtown.com, Realtor.com, Coldwellbanker.com, ForSalebyOwner.com, and Craigslist.org.  You would be surprised to see that many of the properties are not listed on MLS and you just might find a little gem.

Step 2 - Research the area you like the most.  It differs for everyone but I really liked the diversity of Pilsen and the proximity of Pilsen to UIC.  I was also looking at South Loop and Bridgeport.

Step 3 - Get pre-approved for a loan to see what kind of house you can afford.

Step 4- Just for kicks, find the estimated value of the house on Zillow.com and see what the estimated current value of the house is.  This site will also show you previous purchase price of the house (if it’s current) and recent sales in the nearby area.

Step 5- After deciding that you want to make an offer, have your lawyer draw up a contract (the real estate agent does this if you have one).  After some negotiating (NEVER pay full price during these bad times!), you’ll come up with a purchase price that both parties are happy with.

Step 6- Now is the time to have a trusty loan officer to do some work.  Pre-approvals don’t really mean much because they can still deny your loan so it’s best to have the loan officer work in your favor.  I ended up going through my friend who got me a great rate of 5.875 (rates are a little higher right now).

Step 7- I paid $300 for assessment of the house (mandatory for the loan) and $300 for the inspection.  I’ve gone through the inspection process with 3 other inspectors before (family and friend’s places) and I thought mine was the best.

Step 8 - Lawyers and real estate agents will decide on a closing date.  You should have a final walk-through before the actual closing date.  By the closing date, you should receive a full estimate on what the final cost will be (down payment and closing cost).  I believe our closing cost were about $5000-$6000.  They will require that you come with a cashiers check.

Step 9- Once closing is done, enjoy your house!  We ended up doing some renovations and didn’t move in until a few weeks later but you should be able to move in right after closing.

Here and some people I can refer you to:  (Chicago-land area)

Loan Officer (my trusty friend) - will offer the best rates and great personal service

Lawyer - also did a great job and was priced fairly, on top of his game with calls and getting back to me

Inspection - Great inspector and within a few hours, will have all the details online so that you can access it through a log-in site on his complete inspection

Painter - experienced painter with years of experience painting downtown condos

Tree Removal - The lowest quote I received out of 10 estimates(range $1000-$5000), tree removed next day!

Fence - Great prices and great service on fence installation and removal (lowest price quote $1500-$3000)

Carpet - Referral from a friend.  Great carpet and fast service (lowest quote from $1500- $4000)

I can provide you with contact information if you need.  I’m really happy with the level of service, low price, and quality of the products I received.

I recommend that you call around for quotes.  The differences are substantial as you can see from above.

WARNING: Buying a house was very very stressful.  The time during negotiations, waiting for the the close date, making sure the loan gets approved, the cost of down payment and closing cost, and fixing all the minor repairs in the house will drain you down.  Hopefully you can use some of the people I recommended to make life a little easier.  At the end of the day, all the stress and headaches were worth it to own a piece of property!

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!

Posted under First Home

UIC IPD

My first review will be about the IPD - Interdisciplinary Product Development class (IPD Website). While I can’t go into specific details (confidentiality agreement), I will talk about the class a little bit.

The class is run by three professors, Albert Page (Business), Michael Scott (Engineering), and Stephen Melamed (Design). In a perfect world, there would be equal number of students from each of those three colleges. In reality, there are more Design and Engineer students than MBA students. The class is broken down into 5 teams, comprised of 2-3 Design students, 2-3 Engineer students, and 1-2 MBA student in each group.

IPD is actually a very interesting concept. Instead of going through all the regular channels in product development (ie. Marketing–> Design–>Engineer–>Marketing), the team works together throughout the whole process. This eliminates some of the potential problems that may arise from each department and also shortens the time that a product can reach market. If the benefits are so obvious, why isn’t everyone doing this? Well, there are many potential problems that arise within each team. Since the groups are made up of students from three different colleges, different backgrounds, different experiences, it makes it difficult to have an instant bond.

The three professors try to solve this problem through the first few weeks of the class. There are team building events, seminar speakers, and group projects in which you analyze your own group. This all helps a lot but it is up to each individual group to improve itself.

The way the class is run and taught is a little unconventional. The syllabus is a rough guide and project and assignments are constantly being dropped and added. Deadlines and pushed back and forth and it is difficult to follow along with sometimes. I believe Professor Melamed described it best by saying that, all our majors teach us to be problem solvers. We intellectually want to solve the problem but we don’t actually know what the problem is yet. It takes one whole semester to try and figure out the problem and another semester to come up with the solution. We won’t actually know what the problem is until we start analyzing and researching more. The sponsor company doesn’t know the problem, the professors don’t know and we sure as hell don’t know. This feeling we have of uncertainty is often confused with a feeling of frustration.

To sum up, IPD is a pretty interesting class. We work on a real-life problem for a fortune 500 company. As of now, we are trying to identify the problem. The class is definitely unconventional. The classroom is pretty upbeat and unique. You’ll definitely feel out of place because of the mix of students and there is a lot of work outside of class. Besides all this, I am still interested to see where this class is heading. In the real world, you’re not always given a problem and there is not always a solution. We just live and learn.

By the way, for MBA student, you do not need to take Mktg500 before taking this class. You can take it concurrent with it. This is my first semester at UIC and I’m taking both classes. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve updated.  These few months have just been crazy.  Here are some of the future updates I will be writting about:

-Review of each class at UIC I’m currently taking

-Buying and closing on a house

-Updating the house and the costs

-Making big purchases online

I’ll write another post later this week on one of these subjects.  I still have mid-terms this week that I should be studying for.

Posted under Uncategorized