TAMID at Harvard: A Day In The Life
Many club meetings lose sight of their purpose as a space for students to enjoy themselves with friends, falling prey to a dangerous seriousness. Our TAMID meetings, however, have been able to tread the line between effective and fun.
Because we meet in the early evening, many students decide to take advantage of the fact that our TAMID meetings take place in our Hillel and this turns into an opportunity to get a meal with friends beforehand. Once students have eaten, we convene as a group. We go over weekly announcements and then go over that particular day’s schedule. Our next item on the agenda is usually some kind of group discussion or lecture to reinforce our abilities regarding a given subject matter. Around halfway through the meeting, we break into our small teams to go over our consulting projects. Within these groups we work with a company to achieve some goal by doing weekly research assignments.
I think the general flow of these meetings contributes to our chapter’s ability to mix success and enjoyment. Because our meetings often center around meals, they have a communal vibe to them. Furthermore interacting as an entire group during the first half our meetings allows everyone to become familiar with each other while in the context of learning and work. Our small consulting groups are great because they offer us the possibility of forming smaller, tighter communities within the TAMID community. Finally, our occasional guest speaker allows students to learn from premiere experts.
One of our consulting teams is working for the quantitative hedge fund IKnowFirst based out of Tel Aviv. They focus on writing algorithms based on technical analyses of statistics indicating a company’s health. It allows for the application to real situations of what we have learned in economics, statistics, mathematics, computer science, and physics classes. We are also consulting for JSwipe and Birthright.
Some members of our TAMID chapter competed in a Shark Tank pitch competition held at Boston University, and won $1,000 of seed money. One of our winners was former TAMID President Ben Pleat who has founded his own start-up, Doorbell, which focuses on creating tighter communities within urban areas.
TAMID at Harvard has been an incredible opportunity for many entrepreneurial students to hone their skills and meet other like-minded students.