“Wait. What even is Spark?”
We get this a lot, and this is mostly our own fault. We’ve done a bad job of explaining this in the past, so here’s our latest attempt.
We’re hard workers.
Spark is a family of students that organizes events and initiatives to create entrepreneurial opportunities at USC. Not everything we do is event planning; we created the first-ever student-led course at USC and organized an 8-week fashion design incubator. We’ve also run all-women hardware hackathons, several years’ worth of startup career fairs, and a startup accelerator.
Each semester, Spark organizes its members into committees that handle its many rotating initiatives. Though we have some ongoing strongholds, like Founders and Project Launch, new initiatives emerge every semester as USC’s entrepreneurial ecosystem evolves.
We’re also a family.
Spark is made up of students who span a wide range of majors and minors, personal interests, and professional goals. Spark is made up of artists, founders, filmmakers, CS bros, skaters, writers, scientists, and band geeks.
Our love for self-startership and entrepreneurship is what brought us together, but our friendships are genuinely lifelong.
What does it mean to apply to Spark?
You don’t have to apply to Spark’s board to participate in any of our initiatives. Participation in every Spark’s event and initiative is free! Some of our initiatives involve some hard work and competition, though, like 1000 Pitches.
“Applying to Spark” means applying to be part of the leadership board that guides the student-led entrepreneurial environment at USC. We organize events and initiatives and work with school administrators to create entrepreneurial opportunities at USC.
What does it mean to actually join Spark?
When you join Spark, you become part of Spark’s family: roughly 40 USC undergraduates across a range of racial and cultural identities, majors, minors, personal interests, and professional goals.
We call new Spark members “Sparklets.” Sparklets join two existing committees as members for their first semester and go through a training program called Spark Labs, which teaches them the ropes of leadership in Spark. It’s a significant time and work commitment, but we promise that it’s worth every minute.
Joining Spark doesn’t mean getting your startup funded, finding your co-founders, or launching your venture.
Countless Spark members have run successful startups in and after college together, but this isn’t the point of joining Spark’s leadership board. In fact, this is the point of participating in many of our initiatives, like our startup accelerator, our class, or Blueprint, our entrepreneurship Slack group. Information about these initiatives will be released in the coming weeks.
While it’s natural for our members to pair up and work on entrepreneurial ventures, that’s happening outside of Spark. Remember — the mission is paramount.
Once you’re a member of our leadership board, you’re part of that intimate family forever. Spark’s alumni are part of our family, too; they live all over the world doing all sorts of things — building the future of the internet, solving climate change, helping humans remember better, and crafting the next generation of hardware.
While many of our alumni have founded startups or taken jobs in technology, Spark’s interests have become increasingly diverse in the last few years — a trend that Spark’s founding members had hoped to encourage with the mission to showcase the entrepreneurial spirit in all disciplines. Our next graduating classes include film-makers, gerontologists, educators, politicians, writers, activists, artists — and maybe even you!
Although we come from very different backgrounds, we share a heart for our community, a love for our campus, and a desire to learn from other people. We build off each other’s sense of personal entrepreneurship. Most importantly, we share a drive around our mission to make entrepreneurial opportunities available to all USC students.
Our mission is to foster entrepreneurial thought and action across communities of all backgrounds and interests within and beyond USC.
We also developed a list of values to help us shape the pursuit of our mission. An early influence in our values brainstorm was Patrick Lencioni, an expert on teams who frequently writes for HBR. He explained that “values can set an organization apart by clarifying its identity and serving as a rallying point for members.”
Here are some values we hold dear in Spark:
- The mission is paramount.
Our mission is the reason we do everything. We need to constantly interrogate our actions — “how does this serve our mission?” - Everyone is a founder.
Anyone can start anything. The founder energy is about ownership of, agency over, vision for, and responsibility for an idea. - We’re not corporate.
We’re just a group of young people at the end of the day, so our processes can grow and shift flexibly as our vision changes and as USC changes. - But don’t forget about opportunities for personal growth.
Sometimes, it’s best to let someone learn and grow instead of doing the job for them. Our commitment to our own members’ chance to grow and learn is what makes it possible for us to serve our mission and improve as an organization. - Spark is your Spark.
Every member has an equal stake in Spark. If you think that the org should move in a specific direction, the chance to lead the change is always yours to take. - We’re a family.
Getting vulnerable allows you to have deep relationships with others. No matter what you need — homework buddies, a place to stay, a hot meal, or a person to confide in — you’ll find it in Spark. - Fellowship takes work.
Building the family can look effortless, but sometimes it requires persistence, consistent outreach, patience — even forgiveness. And it’s always worth it. - Intention sits at the heart of all action.
Always ask for context before jumping to a conclusion about how decisions were made. This helps increase communication and trust in Spark. - An electric sense of purpose unites us.
In all things, it’s important to remind each other why we do things — whether that’s for the mission, for USC, or for each other.
At the end of the day, Spark is just a group of students…
…with an intense commitment to each other and to USC’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. And we’re still growing.
We’ve found that we can accomplish quite a lot as a family. We’ve changed USC’s curriculum, connected students to jobs, and exposed people to design thinking and hacking. But we still have a lot left to discover about what it means to follow our mission.
While we’re proud that gender parity/neutrality has long been a focus, we’re embarrassed to say that antiracism hasn’t been a priority in Spark until we confronted our complicity as an organization that creates opportunities at USC in 2020.
Spark is a majority Asian and white organization, and if we’re to be serious about our mission to create entrepreneurial opportunities for everyone at USC, we need to be serious about diversifying our internal leadership. Later this week, we’ll post our thoughts on the lessons we’ve learned about our role in antiracism at USC and our approach to it as we recruit in Spring 2021.
As we mentioned at the very beginning of this post, we mentioned that every semester in Spark looks a little different. The most accurate way to identify Spark is with our mission—not the consistency of our work from semester to semester. We know this might create some ambiguity around what Spark will shape up to be each semester, but we keep it that way on purpose. It helps us stay flexible, creative, and ambitious.
