UPDATED: Oct. 25, 2018 at 1:36 p.m.

The Pan Global Entrepreneurs Association, which aims to bridge the gap between international and domestic students at Syracuse University, will host its first innovation competition next month.  

PanGEA will launch its Pan Global Challenge to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week from Nov. 12 to 18. The kick-off event will take place on Nov. 14 at 4 p.m. in Bird Library.  

The club, which was founded by current SU student Dong Hyeok Lee and former SU student Lawrence Lin, is made up of about 20 students from the United States, Korea and China. 

The two international students said they created PanGEA because they saw a lack of interaction between international and domestic students. Increased collaboration between these groups could lead to more opportunities and better project outcomes, Lee said. About 4,000 international students from more than 120 countries attend SU. 

“There is really no communication between international students and domestic students,” Lee said. “We thought that was very problematic in terms of the whole campus. To make people understand that this is really a problem and to really solve this problem, that was the hardest and is still our challenge.” 

Lee added that the creation of PanGEA, which is not yet a registered student organization, was due in part to his experiences in his introduction to entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises class.  

Lee said he felt the need to change how competitions are designed after participating in a EEE competition. The main focus of the competition was supposed to be about the content of the ideas, but Lee said it seemed to focus more on how well each student pitched their ideas. 

Lee’s professor, Linda Hartsock, said he said something very compelling to the judges: “If I was on stage in Korea, pitching this in my native language, I would walk off a winner.”  

Hartsock is also the executive director of the Blackstone LaunchPad, an innovation hub for budding entrepreneurs that’s located in Bird Library. The LaunchPad provides mentorship to PanGEA. Nearly 3,000 students from 91 different countries are part of the LaunchPad currently, Hartsock said.  

Lee, originally from South Korea, has been in Syracuse since 2012 and is a senior industrial and interaction design major. Co-creator Lin, who graduated last May with a dual degree in international relations and political science, is back in China, but remains active with PanGEA. 

For people who don’t speak English as their first language, Lee said, it can be difficult to properly execute a pitch. 

“I felt really bad it was solely designed for students who have English as their first language,” he said. “(It) felt kind of unfair in a way.”  

The Pan Global Challenge is meant to encourage different forms of deliverables, which is a project for a customer. Deliverables could take the form of a report, document, software product, server upgrade or any other building block of an overall project. 

At the event, PanGEA organizers prompt a topic that the students will work on for two weeks prior to the event, and then students will bring a deliverable to the competition. This year’s topic is language and language barriers.  

Braden Croy, program manager of the LaunchPad, is the staff adviser for Thrive at SU, which is another social impact organization that is run out of the LaunchPad. Croy spends time helping individuals start their organization. He said that organizations such as PanGEA are important in today’s business climate. 

“Given the nature of what it means to be a business leader in the 21st century, to have an organization like PanGEA that is actively working to break down the barriers between visitors to the United States and citizens of the United States is incredibly impactful,” he said.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Dong Hyeok Lee was misnamed. The Daily Orange regrets this error. 

Published on October 24, 2018 at 8:48 pm

Contact Sajida: skkunjum@syr.edu