So what exactly is BETA Camp? BETA Camp is a 12-week enrichment program for high school students designed to train the next generation of business leaders, tech innovators and ambitious entrepreneurs. It’s fully online but is super engaging and interactive that many campers actually feel like they connected with others and participated in a more meaningful way than some in-person programs. You will engage in hands-on learning in business, tech, and entrepreneurship, meet inspiring youth from across North America and build a tightly-knit community with them. The program is run by Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs with experience working for billion-dollar companies like Google and Facebook and business leaders at top Wall Street and Bay street companies like investment banks and consulting firms as well as graduates of top MBA programs at Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. You’ll get to connect with so many different mentors and leaders that high school students wouldn’t get to otherwise.

BETA Camp Counselors work at and founded some of the top companies in the world. There will be 40 to 50 different counselors who come teach, run workshops, mentor startups, and serve as investor judges on pitch day. What I loved about BETA Camp is that you are not learning from professors who never worked in the front lines and mostly operate off of case studies, every counselor that comes to teach is able to talk to their own personal experiences and exciting career paths. For example, my favorite was Carolyn Chen, who talked about her experience as the founder and CEO of the makeup brands Orosa Beauty and Vesca Beauty, and what it is like with making the makeup industry more diverse and inclusive by having more shades than any other. Camp counselors come in to do weekend workshops, founder chats sharing their personal experiences when building a startup. We have had founders come in who have raised millions of dollars as well as teenage founders like Ava who started her own company when she was 17 and now works with over 40 top brands including Unilever and Dove. Camp counselors also join for future chat panels where you can learn about different careers in business, engineering, working abroad, working remote, social enterprises, as well as higher ed. So for those of you that want to be a doctor, lawyer, or PhD, BETA Camp can still be for you.

Another workshop that all of us enjoyed and got me out of my comfort zone was rejection training. I am sure that all of us have been afraid to share our thoughts with other people because we were scared of getting rejected or being laughed at. This workshop brings things to the real world. We are to call stores and companies and ask them to fulfill our requests that are unreasonable or takes negotiation. This desensitizes us from rejection and allows us to practice our negotiation skills in order to get our requests fulfilled.

In order to support our learning process on what we actually need to know in order to create a successful startup, there are lectures in a virtual student portal. The curriculum is developed from Silicon Valley incubators and top MBA programs. They take the best of the best, condense it and teach it in bite-sized videos. For example, we learned about building a MVP which then we had to apply to our startups. MVP is our most viable product that allows us to test if customers actually want our product or service. Instead of creating the whole startup and finding out after you pour a lot of money and effort in that no one wants to buy it, it is easier to test it at a smaller scale. For DiverZé, our MVP was just a website with three pages, an Instagram account, and Google forms surveys.

All this content is BETA Camp exclusive and created in-house. The whole program is designed to show you how to start and successfully run and evaluate a business. All the lectures build up to help us create real businesses, gain confidence in our own abilities and skills, and set us up to take on the world!

There were a lot of startups that came out of the summer cohort with real customers. For example: SteerClear signed on Dollarama and Kumon as customers, Local Bundles had 5 restaurant partners, TeachAdapt worked with 5 teachers, Other apps had 30-60 users. This was just in 3.5 weeks. At the end, all startups pitch to real investors at Venture Capital firms for feedback. Startups are supported with weekly meetings with industry mentors. All who are founders, or early-stage employees, or investors in early-stage startups. They also have a lot of experience at innovative companies like Facebook, Bloomberg, and Element AI.

So what are you waiting for? Visit www.beta.camp to apply, there are only 5 short answer questions and there is a word limit. BETA Camp values concise communication and doesn’t believe that leadership skills can only be demonstrated from being a part of numerous clubs. Demonstrating depth of involvement and examples of how you demonstrate initiative and teamwork is essential. For example, a part-time job or helping your family out, volunteering, etc are different ways that you demonstrate your leadership role. Everyone interested can join, no prerequisites of business or coding.