Entrepreneurship Club Hosts Mixer for Students, Parents

Tucked away in a second-floor office in the Palo Alto Town and Country shopping center on the night of Wednesday, May 3, a few dozen students and parents mingled and conversed at Menlo’s Business and Entrepreneurship Club’s first parent-student mixer to promote internship opportunities and career advice to students. 

“I think the mixer was a great way for Menlo parents to talk to Menlo students so that they could immerse themselves in the opportunities they could get,” club president Arthi Abhyanker said.

Overall, the mixer was a success, according to Abhyanker. “I was a little nervous, but we were able to get some opportunities for Menlo students as well as have a lot of parents to share [their experiences],” she said.

In addition to learning about potential internships, students were also able to learn from presentations by adults with experience in the business world. “The students could talk to the parents, almost like being a coach in business and investing in general,” Abhyanker said.

Ethan Weinshel, a junior who attended the event, said that one of the critical lessons he learned from the parents was the need to get real-world experience. “A lot of the broader advice that was shared was to ‘Go out and sell something,’ and see how it goes, just so you can have involvement from a young age,” Weinshel said. “You can get [into] the mindset of an entrepreneur, and that felt inspiring.”

During the mixer, around ten summer internship opportunities were presented to the students. Sophomore Kc Chavinson applied for a position at a scheduling software startup founded by Weinshel’s mom. “[She] offered an application for an internship at her start-up, AgendaHero,” Chavinson said. “She wanted a younger perspective for the project because a large portion of the users would be high-school students.”