The Thiel Fellowship is being offered by Toronto’s project RHINO. This program offers students a large amonut of 100,000 dollars to leave university for a while and take up a venture like starting a business, carrying out research or some other useful work in the practical world. This program is for a period of two years and is ofeered to those under the age of 20. A total of 20 to 30 students will be given this opportunity each year.
The venue for this event will be the RHINO lounge which was some extra unutilized space in the offices of RHINO.
Neil Martin, the cofounder for RHINO thinks that it is an effective way to utilize the empty space in the offices as they were already planning for expansion and also that a large number of people will be able to see RHINO’s office through the event for Thiel Fellowship. “The Thiel Fellowship’s unique ideology of encouraging young people to forego school in favour of the entrepreneur life resonated well with Project RHINO. Martin said entrepreneurship is something that requires a leap of faith, and “we see RHINO as this haven for people who made the decision to go for it.”
“We have people in our space who dropped out of school or quit their full time jobs to put it all on the line and chase their passion,” added Martin. “Given that that’s essentially the mission of the Thiel Fellowship I thought it was a perfect partnership.”
However there was only space for 80 people and this was taken up very quickly but new positions will open up in a while according to Martin.
The main speakers for this event will be two brilliant people. These are namely Michael Cheng and Maya Burhanpurkar. Michael Cheng has been recognized for his leadership skills by Macleans while Burhanparkar aged 13 has been in the limelight for biological sciences.Burhanparkar has some very great achievements that are worth mentioning at such a young age.“According to Wikipedia, Burhanpurkar is a “high school scientist.” At the age of just 12, she developed an intelligent-antibiotic, which selectively kills pathogenic bacteria such as E-coli but preserves the body’s helpful intestinal microbiota bacteria. For this she received the S.M. Blair Foundation award for innovation. Burhanpurkar also won the Grand Platinum Award at the 2013 Canada-Wide Science Fair for her work on the cardiac and gastrointestinal safety of two Alzheimer’s drugs.”
Cheng believes that such ventures provide a great opportunity for his generation as previously it was difficult for young people to have their own startups etc but now its even possible at this age through as now the world is fast paced and changing rapidly. Cheng himself admitted that he would definitely have wanted to participate in this Fellowship if it had been present at his time.
Source: TechVibes