The inaugural graduation ceremony of Lakehead University’s 12-week Ascend Accelerator program celebrated the achievements of eight students.
The program helps entrepreneurs kick-start their businesses, turning aspirations into reality.
Alyson MacKay is the Engineer of Ingenuity at Lakehead and was heavily involved in the development of the entrepreneurs. She talks about what the program itself looked like.
“It was an application-based and interview-based program, so the teams had to apply [and] go through a bit of a business pitch to get in,” says MacKay. “It’s been 12 weeks, they’ve set mutual milestones, they were all at very different levels getting into the program and working through it. We’ve hosted 16 workshops, 24 milestone meetings, countless mentor meetings, and we’ve just had an incredible amount of support from the community [and] the university.”
MacKay says she’s seen improvements from all of the participants.
“It’s different on so many levels,” explains MacKay. “Most of them starting out, we had no branding, no websites, no social media, and now here they are with websites, they’re calling customers, they’re getting business cards out there.”
MacKay says the graduation was even more special because it was the first time she got to see all the students face to face. As a result of the pandemic, the program was pushed online.
Ajey Meekis was part of the team behind By The Bay, an E-Sports company bringing competitive tournaments to Thunder Bay. He says while all the students were provided with excellent advice and guidance, it was really up to them to excel.
“Every week we met we Alyson, and they were pretty much goal setting meetings to kind of set the tone for the week, but we did the work during the week,” says Meekis. “It was great, it really pushed us, held us accountable, and obviously the funding helped us get started up as well.”
Funding for the program was provided by FedNor to help the students get their businesses running.
This was the first cohort of graduates, which saw a diverse group of businesses, including:
- Titan Intelligence founded by Marius Fejzulla, Marko Javorac, and Yash Gupta
- The Bay E-Sports founded by Ajey Meekis and Tristan St. Aubin
- Manilla founded by Nehi Igbinijesu and Austin Otsu
- Sunkissed Universe founded by Mary Wokomah
