FEATURES

Building community by Bridging the Gap

BELLA ORTLEY-GUTHRIE Staff Writer

Collaborative, innovative, exible, understanding and supportive; these are the words that come to the minds of Wake Forest students Mason Goodwyn and Savant Patel when thinking about Bridging the Gap. Bridging the Gap (BTG) is a diverse and inclusive community that supports Black and indigenous people of color (BIPOC) in the business eld by providing consulting and nancial experience.

Devon Triplett, a current sophomore at the University of North Carolina, founded BTG when he noticed a need for connection and networking between BIPOC business leaders and minority-owned businesses.

“I started it as a rst-semester freshman, which was kind of wild,” Triplett said. “I took part in my school’s consulting organization and noticed there was a lack of helping diverse students on a national scale. I was the only person of color in my consulting organization, and when COVID-19 came around, I realized that I wanted to provide consulting services to minority owned businesses across the country.”

Triplett connected with students at Stanford and Harvard to work on providing pro-bono consulting for minority-owned businesses – this resulted in BTG Consulting. From engaging in BTG Consulting, Triplett and his team noticed a need and potential model for building mentorship and networking for future BIPOC business leaders — leading to BTG’s development.

BTG focuses on consulting and nance through its pro-bono consulting and BTG Nexus Fund programs, allowing students to have hands-on learning experience through consulting and by working on digital asset funds, “through a structured, thesis-driven approach.”

BTG recently expanded into nance with the BTG Nexus Fund which focuses on digital asset portfolio investing, including non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies. Current BTG students work at numerous companies, including Deloitte, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Bridging the Gap o ers two paths for students: BTG Family and BTG Launch. BTG Family consists of 87 students across schools such as Wake Forest, Stanford and the University of Miami. BTG Family is also more competitive, with a 10% acceptance rate and a selective application process. e second path, BTG Launch, is an inclusive program with over 180 students representing schools across the country. In BTG Launch, students are provided weekly meetings with services like case prep programs where BTG executives bring in professionals and prep students for interviews with rms. ey invite guest speakers, conduct cover letter/resume-writing workshops and even host stress management workshops. Both o er similar opportunities with networking – the only di erence is that BTG Family is a smaller and more intimate experience for students. BTG’s focus on mentorship and networking extends to both BTG Launch and BTG Family.

“We have tons and tons and tons of mentorship. From just the upperclassmen who are in the organization down to the underclassmen — everyone’s just one Slack message away,” said Triplett.

Part of these mentorships extends to a big and little — where a big (upperclassmen student) is assigned two or three littles (underclass) — to help build a resume and answer any of their questions.

“We’re very intentional about fostering an environment to facilitate connections and mentorship. We also have companies and professionals who come in to help development of our students, our Nexus fund and our pro bono consulting engagements,” said Triplett. e inclusive environment is appreciated by students across the country and at Wake Forest University.

“It was great to join this organization overall, because it’s a community of people that look like me in business,” said Goodwyn, a Wake Forest freshman who recently joined BTG Launch. “And we need more of that at Wake Forest at times, especially when it can be isolating in the business school or other classroom environments.”

Goodwyn also gained experience from the networking BTG Launch provides.

“I realized most people at BTG I could talk to for just experience,” Goodwyn said. “I can ask, ‘Hey, how would I do this interview for X company? A lot of people have given me great tips. I’ve been able to give other people tips. So, it’s a great circle of receiving help and giving help to other peoples in the community that pushes us forward.”

To learn more, follow @the_btgfamily.

Photo courtesy of Bridging the Gap

The organization connects members to jobs and fosters professional connections.

Contact Bella Ortley-Guthrie at ortlbs@wfu.edu

Fuzemee comes to Wake Forest University

Designed by a Wake Forest student, this app seeks to help students connect through an accessible platform

CHASE BAGNALL-KOGER Features Editor

As classrooms ll up with new students and clubs begin their beginning-of-year recruitment with their posters and brightly-colored club fair tents, new students are bombarded with a variety of interesting yet disconnected ways to become ingrained in the elusive ‘college community.’

Di erent extracurricular groups around campus use various social media platforms, ranging from Instagram to Discord to GroupMe — to reach students who are overwhelmed by the amount of content coming at them from all digital directions. e same can be true for prospective students who are interested in seeing what a school may have to o er.

“I would de nitely say there is a lot of room for improvement in gaining a feel for the schools you are interested in,” high school senior Maia Bertheir said. “Non school-a liated platforms like Instagram have been helpful, but it still feels like there are things that we are missing.”

To address this issue, Wake Forest sophomore Jon Krouse and his co-founders created Fuzemee, an app that seeks to centralize this information in one place by combining aspects of advertising with the ability for current and prospective students to connect with each other.

“ e idea is to create a centralized college micro-community for students so that they can have the best possible experience during their years in school,” Krouse said. e all-in-one platform allows students to nd (both school-wide and club-speci c) events, chat with people who may have shared interests, and search for a potential roommate by lling out the roommate questionnaire included in the app.

Users can “ lter” through other users with a variety of categories, such as majors, interests and extracurriculars in order to nd people that they may be compatible with even before physically being on campus.

“Looking back on my college experience, I wonder if there have been groups that I would have been involved with as an underclassman if I had known about them,” senior Ted Middleton said. “I feel like this app can really help a lot of people nd their footing.” e idea for the program was originally developed by three high school friends — Chris Tsetsekos, Krouse and David Graham. After committing to three di erent universities, they were all encouraged to join Facebook pages for rising freshmen that Krouse described as “large and impersonal;” it was di cult for them to get more immersed in their respective schools and form connections with other incoming students.

“We started discussing a problem that we were encountering because that’s how all the best ideas start — by noticing an issue and nding a solution,” Krouse said.

After the initial rounds of fundraising resulted in $125,000 of investments, the three creators decided to invest the amount of time and labor they were contributing to Fuzemee.

“We realized that since these people were putting in their key nancial capital and to us, we needed to match that and put our full human capital into them,” Krouse said. “ So we all decided to take gap years.”

Krouse explained that the rst kind of steps involved putting all the initial ideas into a pitch deck and design book to present to a software developer to help bring the designs to life. is included hiring a Jakarta-based coder, who the founders contacted through a coding talent-search, to create screens with the functionality behind every step, every color and every font size. is project, overseen by Professor Gregory Pool of the Entrepreneurship department, underwent beta tests in entrepreneurship and pre-Wall Street track classes before the app launched to the public.

Since its initial conception, Fuzemee has evolved to include several other features, one of which is “Marketplace” which allows students within a school to buy and sell items within the safety of campus.

“I think it’s going to really help students with decluttering the room, making extra money on being able to purchase things that at a cheap price that they couldn’t have gotten somewhere else,” Krouse said.

Since Fuzemee is launched on a school-by-school basis, it was originally limited to a few schools including Tufts, Hofstra and Bucknell. is semester, that list expanded to include Syracuse, North Carolina State and, as of March 21, Wake Forest. According to Krouse, there are more on the way.

“We have about 500 schools in our database with each school posessing a ‘waiting room’ where we can see how many students have signed up to the page,” Krouse said. “Once the percentage students in the waiting room is high enough relative to the student body population, we will launch to that university, too.” Contact Chase Bagnall-Koger at bagncm21@wfu.edu