McDaniel College students compete for $5K in annua

Daily Record Staff//April 21, 2021//

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Five student teams will present their entrepreneurial ideas and products to a panel of experts in search of a $5,000 first prize during the McDaniel College Entrepreneurial Competition April 29 at 7 p.m.

Formerly the Innovation Challenge Finals, the event will be livestreamed via Zoom. First place wins $5,000, with $1,000 for second place and $1,000 for the People’s Choice Award.

The five finalists are:

CeReal, presented by senior Justin Chapin, a business administration major with minors in entrepreneurship and marketing from Damascus. CeReal is an app that organizes student activities, interests, and organizations to increase community engagement at colleges.
Crowned Beauty, presented by sophomore Mariama Mohammed, a computer science major from Woodbridge, Virginia, and sophomore Jani Pierre, a business administration major with minors in entrepreneurship and marketing from Frederick. They plan a beauty store that caters specifically to people of color, something the pair says does not exist in Westminster, and it would help McDaniel students who have to travel outside of Westminster to find basic hair products.
presented by senior Carly Critchfield, an economics and political science major with a minor in Arabic from Grass Lake, Mich. FluentSpeak utilizes short, language-specific assessments to match world language learners together at similar skill levels. Critchfield says this is the first online platform specifically designed for those seeking to practice and improve their conversational language skills to be used in conjunction with or after completion of their world language studies.
Life Tacos, presented by junior Jessie Titus, an environmental studies major from Frederick and junior Julianna Dotterweich, an accounting, economics, and business administration major from Timonium. Through Life Tacos, the pair plans to provide a food options for those customers that want to make a change in their personal health and for the environment.
Prime Reach, presented by junior Joshua Arruda, an accounting, economics and business administration major from Morrisville, Pennsylavnia, is what Arruda calls the one-stop shop for independent artists/musicians looking for the right promotion. All playlists are checked through chart metrics to ensure absolutely organic engagement.

The judges who will choose the winning teams include Rachel Druckenmiller, CEO, speaker and facilitator at Unmuted LLC; Lauren Asghari, founder and managing director at Alderson Loop; Graham Dodge, executive director at Westminster’s Mid-Atlantic Gigabit Innovation Collaboratory, Inc.

McDaniel College’s entrepreneur-in-residence Jennifer Yang serves as the master of ceremonies. Yang is an entrepreneur with more than 23 years of strategy, management, and technology consulting experience working with CXO-level stakeholders at Fortune 50 companies, start-up ventures and federal agencies.