When their competition year began last August 2006, SIFE had one team member. Robin Lewis, a BlochMBA student, had joined SIFE in the fall of 2005 and made a meteoric climb to president just a few months later—only to watch as her award-winning team members all graduated.

At the beginning of the fall semester, Robin was SIFE.

Reaching Out

While other SIFE teams around the globe planned and implemented their projects, Robin recruited. She scoured student activity fairs, talking up SIFE’s ability to instill leadership skills and pump up resumes. She posted fliers, marketed, persuaded, campaigned—and slowly, but surely, built a solid team.

Her efforts yielded 11 new members, from freshman to graduate students, who represented 9 different majors, including medicine, chemistry, finance, accounting, and human resources.

“That brings a little of everything into the mix,” says Robin of the SIFE team’s diversity. “It makes us stronger as a team and it gives us different perspectives to draw on.”

Arindam Ganguly, a chemistry grad student, agrees and adds: “As a grad student, you get so focused in your lab that you forget that there’s another part of it. SIFE has given me a window to see something new and do something new—and to grow business skills that will challenge me in my career.”

Open for Outreach

A global nonprofit organization, SIFE links higher education and business in the form of university student teams. These teams, led by faculty advisors, develop outreach projects that create economic opportunities for their communities.

“SIFE draws on an extensive network of student entrepreneurs,” says Cary Clark, SIFE advisor and Sam Walton Fellow. “They compete annually to test the impact of their projects.”

In January, UMKC’s SIFE team launched their first project. “A Day in the Life” brought 80 area high school students to UMKC to learn about college life.

With that project under their belt, the SIFE team hit the ground, running. They organized a Career Day; a Business Ethic Seminar, featuring Richard Gibson, vice president and chief administrative officer at the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce; and an area-wide SIFE celebration of EntrepreneurshipWeek USA, with a keynote from accomplished entrepreneur Joe Roetheli, co-founder of S&M NuTec and the force behind Greenies, the best-selling pet treat.

And then the SIFE team compiled their three-months of work into a 24-minute presentation, loaded five teammates, a technician, and their two advisors in a van, and drove the six and half hours to competition.

“We knew we had good projects and a good performance,” says Robin. “We had high hopes, but not one of us had been to competition before.”

A Victory in the Journey

“We were all very proud of the work we’d done, but we were a new team,” admits Clark. “We really didn’t expect to get much but experience from the competition.”

When the team was named among the finalists, Clark was sure they had won rookie of the year. But as the officials called the winners one by one—rookie of the year, fourth place, third place—it became clear that this SIFE team had, in just three short months, exceeded even their own expectations.

And for Robin, the trophy is bonus: “Being able to attend competition for the first time with my team and seeing the enthusiasm they have developed for SIFE, was the crowning moment for my own personal victory.”