Level Up-3

The Student ExperienceAfsane Baghestani, a student at the University of Manitoba, who took third place in the overall event with his Team Cmurgh, worked with Tyler Phill, Founder and CEO of My Student Wellbeing on a challenge sourced through the Riipen platform, focusing on the question "How might we make the format for consuming mental health and wellbeing related content engaging for post-secondary students?"Afsane shared, “Working on an important challenge from a real employer gave us the opportunity to find a way to use our academic knowledge to solve a real issue.”

What he found most interesting was applying his knowledge to suggest realistic solutions to a real-world issue, break it down into smaller components and find ways to tackle them step by step. Another important element for Afsane was to learn how to collaborate with others.

“As we were a team, I learned how to work efficiently with others, listen to their ideas and try to make a solution better by discussing. This event helped me realize my strengths and weaknesses so I gained confidence and also understood where I should work harder to improve myself.”

The Dream Team was another multi-school team that participated in the event, and tackled the same challenge as Team Cmurgh. The team included students from The University of Winnipeg, RRC Polytech, and University of Manitoba. Student Navdeep Kaur Sran, from the RRC Polytech Business Technology Management Program shared how his team developed empathy and collaboration quickly.

“We were able to work together by understanding each other's abilities and dividing the work accordingly. This is what I liked the most about [the experience] as we were just strangers to each other but still able to adapt to this new team environment.” Navdeep also shared his appreciation for the employer with whom his team collaborated. “Working with our challenge representative, Tyler Phill, was awesome. In our first meeting, we had good insights about the project requirements and our client's expectations. Our team had brainstorming sessions to better understand and cater to the needs of the project.” Through this challenge, Navdeep learned about innovation, and collaboration by working with post-secondary students from other schools. “It was all about problem-solving and creating a solution as a minimum viable prototype to a real business challenge. I felt very excited from the day I met my new team and the journey turned out to be fabulous.”

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