One of the newest clubs at UR is the UR Business and Investment Club. The name states the main goals of the club, which are to promote entrepreneurship, create an open forum for business ideas, encourage the development of on and off campus business plans, and, in the future, to provide venture capital for student run businesses. “The support for the club has been overwhelming and thanks to many hard-working officers and members, our goals are already coming to fruition,” junior and club president Ankur Pansari said.
This is just a small portion of what this dedicated group of students does. The club also provides many services. They are an outlet for questions and opportunities regarding careers. Going hand in hand with their career counseling is guidance for interviews, resumes and internships.
“I joined the Business and Investment Club because there were people who had similar career interests,” sophomore Mubarek Said said.
In conjunction with career services they have brought speakers from the business world to campus. Most recently John Morphy, Senior Vice President of PAYCHEX, a payroll service, spoke about his success in the business community and last April a representative from Merrill Lynch spoke.
URBIC isn’t stopping at the college level, though. They participate in Learning for Life, which is a non-profit organization which provides learning workshops for high school students, where they teach the students business skills.
Their latest initiative is a book buy back program. www.ur-buyback.com, which should be up and running by the time you read this. The project is slated to be a site where students can find out how much they can expect to get for their used books before they bring them back to the book store. The club worked with General Manager of the Bookstore Frank Tallarico to get this program running.
Along with the price quotes, the new program will offer some incentives for using it this first time around. One lucky student who uses the site this winter to sell his books back will get all textbooks free for the coming semester. Since they can’t do this for everyone, people who use the site will get a 20 percent off one item coupon for the bookstore.
“The business club provides students with interests in business and investment an irreplaceable forum for sharing ideas and achieving great things,” sophomore, an organizer of the program, Josh Shapiro said. He said the reason why they are starting the program is so more books stay on campus and more students have the opportunity to buy used, less expensive books.
URBIC is open to anyone and they have meetings every three weeks.
