Small Moments in Between the Big Moments: Aayush’s BizTech Journey
Feat. Aayush Kogar — Experiences Lead 2022/23
Can you give us a short intro about yourself?
I’m Aayush, a 4th-year BUCS student, and BizTech has been a game-changer part of my university experience. Having spent my first year online due to covid, community-building was difficult and the 14-hour time zone difference didn’t help at all. That’s when I decided to join Biztech’s tri-mentorship program as a mentee. The program opened opportunities for me to meet genuine life-long friends who have stuck with me through the years, supportive mentors who have groomed my understanding of self, and an amazing community of like-minded hungry solvers.
My experience with the Tri-Mentorship program, alongside my love for case competitions, led me to join the executive team first as a Competitions Director, then moving up to the Experiences Lead the following year. It was only right to give back to the community after I had received so much from it.
Outside of BizTech, I enjoy playing sports, writing, and traveling — but most of the time you’ll find me attempting to grow my small business at a nearby Starbucks.
Can you walk us through the various roles you’ve held in BizTech?
ThinkTECH Director (2021/22)
ThinkTECH was a seven-year-old annual technical case competition held by UBC BizTech, SFU MISA, and Deloitte Consulting. As the Competition Director in charge of ThinkTECH, I attempted to improve the current status quo of one of the historically toughest student competitions by adding more touchpoints with the client to add realism to the case scenario for the competitors. Balancing the priorities of not only the three organizing partners, but also the participants, and the client partner proved to be unsurprisingly challenging. However, it taught me valuable lessons in maintaining a gentle yet assertive approach to collaboration and working in teams. Carrying these learnings, I later organized a smaller Disrupting Finance event focused on teaching students about blockchain. The idea behind the event stemmed from my own passion to understand the new up-and-coming technologies around me and I also wanted to highlight outstanding student initiatives in this field.
Experiences Lead (2022/23)
I worked alongside 9 Event Directors in building the most diverse line-up of experiences BizTech has ever seen. At its core, my role as Experiences Lead was to help the Directors turn their passions into valuable events for the community. My job started from hiring the team, identifying community needs, and guiding the execution of every event. Seeing the different flavours of each Director come to life through their events was the most inspiring part of this role — the tears of joy shed by Directors after completing a successful event was a near second.
Being a firm believer that the small moments between the big ones are what makes an experience great, I always tried to highlight the often-forgotten details during event planning. For example, before the opening ceremony, many members can be found sitting on their phones, waiting for the conference to begin. We asked ourselves how we could leverage this time to grow our personal relationship with the community and introduced sessions, games, and other details that takes a good event and turns it into a great event.
Developer (23/24)
As a developer, I’ve had the opportunity to work on product management, the frontend and the backend (database) of our BizTech web-app. The app is custom built to dynamically assist every BizTech member’s experience in a different way. With this, our development team worked on a wide range of things from marketing the product, onboarding users at events, collecting raw data and of-course, customer support. Gaining this holistic perspective was invaluable for me as I head into further software endeavors. Learn more about the developer role by reading about one of BizTech’s most cracked developer: Jerry Xu’s reflection post.
BizTech Events Team was originally named Community Projects Team. What prompted you to rename it to the Experiences Team?
Originally, BizTech led two different types of events: annual large scale and smaller ad-hoc events. During my first year as ThinkTECH director, I noticed our smaller events were not receiving enough attention, leading to disappointment among our members. Meanwhile, the larger events were successful; however, the planning process was draining due to the lack of team cohesion, and directors were not learning from each other’s events. Seeing these inefficiencies alongside the ability of events to make larger community impacts, prompted me to take up the role as experiences lead and reorganize the team structure.
Renaming the team to “Experiences” allowed me to echo my vision for the events team. An event helps you learn something, but an experience gets you to feel something, leaving you touched and inspired. The leadership team believed that it’s this feeling — whether it is encouragement to embrace new challenges, exceeding expectations in care, or celebrating achievements, this is what creates lasting core memories at our events. With this hypothesis, I dived into a year focused on converting every event into an experience, both for the organizing directors and the attendee’s participating.
My strategy was to give directors the freedom to build experiences that reflected their flavour. Event Directors no longer needed to rekindle a past project, but were instead given opportunities to explore their passions and quirks in the experience they were creating — leading to a host of new, never before seen events such as Gameworld, Innovent, and Data & Beyond. Beyond that, the directors brought their flavor to the minor aspects of the event — whether that be opening ceremony videos, gamification, prizes or food choices.
What makes your experience with BizTech unique?
“I never thought that a simple club could change my entire university experience..”
BizTech brings together a driven, intelligent and wacky group of students who believe in sacrificing their time for the community. We bond over our time-management struggles, varied interests, common sacrifice and growth over time.
Over my career in BizTech, I was able to participate in many enjoyable activities ranging from intramural sports (soccer, basketball) and ski-trips. As you can expect from a bunch of semi-nerds, we’re not exactly star athletes but we enjoy working together to improve one-another. I’ve formed some of my best UBC memories during these simple moments.
At the same time, I loved the fact that we took our roles at Biztech quite seriously. We have a lineage of executives from the past ten years who built the BizTech ecosystem, community and pride. They often still support us in our initiatives through mentorship or funding. Their legacy of building one of UBC’s largest clubs inspires us to never settle for average, and always continue growing.
What was your proudest accomplishment as Experiences Lead?
What fills me with the most pride is witnessing my directors embrace ownership and forge deep emotional connections with their respective events. Many BizTech executives sacrifice a lot for the club whether that’s time, grades, jobs, and more. Seeing all nine of my Events Directors rejoin the team the following year proved that their sacrifice was worth it. The support they received and the impact they made overcame any hint of burnout in their endeavors. It is this support and enablement that I am most proud of leaving the club, and hopefully it has lasting impacts for the years to come.
Who should apply for the Experiences Team?
Those who feel high self-satisfaction by building and creating for others will enjoy being on the Experience Team. It provides you an opportunity to turn novel, innovative ideas (no matter how unique or grand) into a reality for the students around you.
Some advice: Come into the role with a vision of what kind of experiences you want BizTech to host. What processes you want to build. What you want to maximize. Then be open to learning from those around you to make that vision a reality.
Some key traits that are important to the job are empathy, organization and agility. There is no straight path to organizing an optimal event that works for you. You’ll need to be able to navigate the mess with a clear north star along with the support of others around you.
As you transition out of BizTech, what do you want the club to be remembered for?
I hope BizTech is remembered for being a club that is continuously innovative, demanding and empowering. This year I was lucky enough to see new faces come in and demand obsessively, create freely and empower plenty.
Post BizTech Plans
As I enter my last year at UBC, I hope to come back to BizTech as a Tri-Mentorship mentee and continue learning from the community. This learning has been so valuable to me as it forces me to figure out what questions I need answered. Other than that, I plan to continue my learning in the world of data, finance, entrepreneurship and writing through interactive experiences. You can find exactly what I’m up to and the mistakes I am making at a nearby Starbucks, my Linkedin or instagram.
Interested in joining BizTech? Check out our hiring package!
Written by : Aayush Kogar (Developer), Kate Morinaka (Partnerships Lead)
Edited by : Cheryl Zhang (Marketing & Design Lead)
