TAMID at Brandeis
This year TAMID at Brandeis has undergone many exciting changes. For starters, we had a very successful recruitment resulting in a flood of impressive new applicants. We’ve accepted around 40 new members who are eager and ready to dedicate themselves to TAMID. With six consulting projects, we’ve been extremely busy. We’ve also started having chapter meetings before the individual consulting group meetings. During each of these chapter meetings, a group of three members present current events from the Israeli start-up world (shout out to TAMID at BU for the idea!). Another exciting program we have started this year is the TAMID Fund, lead by Evan Goldstein, and it has been a huge success! With 15 new members the fund is a close-knit group that is enthusiastic, motivated, and ready to learn.
This semester we have also focused on bringing in a wide range of interesting speakers. We kicked off the semester with Sarah Trager from MassChallenge, a startup accelerator program in Boston. She spoke to us about their program with Israeli startups and why they choose to work with these companies. She brought two CEO’s with her, Guy Seemann from ReThink Pharmaceuticals, and Eran Gronich from Flying Spark. [Fun fact: one of our consulting groups is working with Flying Spark this semester!] Professor Grace Zimmerman, our faculty advisor and a professor in the business school, spoke to us about her career and gave us pointers for consulting. Brandeis’ Hiatt Career Center taught our chapter how to touch up our LinkedIn accounts and resumes. Steven Halper, father of Yalea Halper (TAMID Fund member), spoke to ours and Northeastern’s fund about his career in finance.
This week we had a public speaking professor from Brandeis, Alex Jacobs, teach us how to improve our public speaking skills. Professor Jacobs started off his lecture by telling us a story from when he was 15 years old and met his best friend. Our members then dissected the way he spoke and what made his speech interesting. Some things we came up with were: purposeful movement, hand gestures, body language, vocal variety, and speaking in present tense. Then we split up into pairs and told our own stories and critiqued our partner’s story. Things got interesting when Professor Jacobs asked us to repeat our stories, but without words. If you looked around the room, you saw our members running, jumping, and doing hilarious hand motions. To conclude, one of our members told a story about a time she went camping and a bear ate all of her food. It was a great learning experience for our chapter, especially right before our final presentations.
With a very busy semester coming to an end we are looking forward to next semester and what is to come. We already have some amazing speakers lined up for next semester and are excited to plan many more social events with our chapter and the other Boston area chapters. We can’t wait to see what else this year brings us.