20A - Growing Your Social Capital

Domain in Industry

1. A good friend of mine who I met in a business class last year. She’s from a small town in Florida, always lived in an eco-friendly home, and strived to make a difference here in Gainesville when she started at UF.

2. This person fills the domain expert.

3. I met her in a class last year and I sent her a friendly message a few days ago asking her for her help and advice for my business idea which was similar to hers but served a different purpose.

4. She told me she had the urge to start her own organization on campus to promote better recycling services around campus since she thought they weren’t that good. She aimed to make campaigns about the benefits of recycling, raffles, and speaking to important staff from UF about taking serious actions around campus. The favor I found that she did for me was give me advice as to how a student-run organization takes time, no matter how organized you are, meetings and writing e-mails all take time. There may not always be something successful that comes out of a meeting, so patience is key and eventually efforts will be made towards your goal.

5. Including her in my network will enhance my ability to exploit an opportunity because she already has prior experience in the same idea I have. Not only will this help my networking skills relating to my business idea, but I can utilize her as a mentor. Our purposes are different but they both include starting a student-run organization on campus in order to educate college students or help college students make their voices heard.

Market Expert

1. My older cousin who comes to UF and works at Study Edge. He was born and raised in Miami and has a passion for helping college students have an easier life.

2. He fills the market expert because he’s in the market of helping college students’ lives easier not harder by the way they study and properly prepare for exams. He has seen the business side of the company by being an intern and easily gave me a perspective of how they view college students and they deserve as much help as they can get.

3. I hadn’t spoken to my cousin in a few weeks and I decided to randomly face-time him a few days ago asking about his work at Study-edge and their motive to help college-students.  I explained to him my business idea and he thought it was great and gave me professional advice.

4. The favor they did for me is to give me the contact information to the manager of Study Edge in order for me to get a better one-on-one experience talking about my business idea. In return I expect to learn how I can better reach out to college students and grab their attention on making their lives easier just like study edge does!

5. Including this person in my network will enhance my ability to exploit an opportunity because I would have gotten a strong opinion from someone who started their company from the bottom just to make college students’ lives easier. I know this network will give me incentive to reach my goal.

Supplier

This person is an RTS bus driver who serves college students in the UF community get around campus. He has been working for the RTS bus services for the past 3 years and is originally from Gainesville.

I’m filling the supplier with this person because he provides a service on a daily basis for college students who either have no forms of transportation and who can’t drive to campus due to lack of parking spaces and traffic.

I found this RTS bus driver as I was getting on a bus at the hub on campus and since the bus usually stops there for 5-10 minutes, I had the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

The favor he did for me was make me more aware of the traffic and lack of space on campus for thousands of students to transport around every day. When speaking about the expensive parking fees, he mentioned how it was a disgrace because as it is campus is not that safe because of all the mopeds, people walking, bikes, and busses so students already have enough to worry about.

Including this person will enhance my networking for my business idea because I was given motivation to make a stronger effort for college students who don’t have means of transportation.

Reflect:

This experience will shape how I participate in any future networking events because it made me aware of the diverse people who could be part of the same industry. In my case, a college student, an employee at a company, and a bus driver. This experience did differ from networking experiences in the past because I usually just tend to network with people in the business field.