Pitch your idea!
Find teammates; win money; have fun!
IEEE Region 6 is offering $1500 prize money for students who upload a persuasive pitch for their next project, company idea, or hackathon team.
Communication is everything these days, and the only way to get attention and funding for your ideas is to present them in a concise, compelling way. This competition is for students to upload a video to YouTube (maximum length 2 minutes) where they do ONE (not all!) of the following:
- Pitch a project — say you want to work on a cool extracurricular project, either for a hackathon, capstone, or simply for fun. This kind of pitch is to attract your fellow IEEE Student Members as talent to help you get the project moving
- Pitch your research — say you want to advance your undergraduate research. This kind of pitch is to persuade your faculty advisor to provide you the resources to let you go deeper in pursuit of a research question of interest to you both.
- Pitch IEEE! — say you want to recruit new members to join your branch. Why would they join? How would they benefit? What if they don’t have any spare time?
A handout from the Pitching Workshops held at each of the Area meetings across Region 6 this month is available as a general outline (2015 idea pitching workshop v4). Young Professionals are encouraged to participate and are eligible to present during the Lightning Round at the Rising Stars conference but are not eligible to win the cash prizes.
TIMELINE:
- All during the month of October we have been holding Pitching Workshops at Area meetings Region-wide as part of the Student Leadership Training.
- Videos must be uploaded by November 30.
- Winners of the video portion will be notified by December 15 and will have the opportunity to present onstage at the Rising Stars Conference, January 2-4, 2016. Winners are responsible for making their own travel arrangements to Las Vegas.
At Rising Stars, another workshop will be held for those who were unable to attend the first rounds during the month of October. A live session will then be held with prizes available for the best presenters from the Lightning Rounds.
PRIZES:
$500: Judged best video. For uploading an eligible video with the best explanation/persuasion of the idea
$250 People’s choice best video. By online voting.
At Rising Stars:
$500 Judged best live demo. For explaining their idea in the most compelling manner on stage.
$250 People’s choice best demo chosen by audience.
Winners will be chosen by a panel of qualified engineering professionals and separate winners will be chosen by counting what are deemed to be eligible online votes by a combination of social media.
2016 Competition Winner’s Video: Humanoid Robots