On October 30, 2009, we welcomed our Business Advisory Board to our first dinner meeting held at the University Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Nine members, Abby Houck, Joseph Mertz, David Betts, Andy Douglass, Carl Knoblock, John Hooker, Claudia Kirkpatrick, Tony Stanton, and Lauren Silverstin, were able to attend while another nine were unable to for various reasons. The meeting started with an introduction of our organization and a presentation by Tony Wang, the Business Advisory Board liaison, and Scarlett Su, the President, of Carnegie Mellon's chapter of Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE). After this presentation, the Business Advisory Board members discussed possible ways in which they could help using their many different talents and skills. Some of the ideas that came up were: helping SIFE members "get in the door" to local high schools or organizations through contacts, providing advice, support and ideas to all members, giving feedback on presentations, helping to show a demonstrated value in the projects, using connections to broaden the Business Advisory board, accessing media outlets to bring about awareness, and finally, to provide continuity for CMU SIFE's organization.
    Going forward, we are continually stressing active involvement between our student leaders and the Business Advisory Board. This great interaction can truly make the difference between a semi-successful project to a largely successful one. In the future, we also want to stress the importance of creating tangible products and measurable results for our projects to help in our national competition. Our projects are also very varied in the six pillars they strive to fulfill, and we must show their cross-functionality and the wide range of audience that they hope to help. Hopefully we can improve upon practices from the previous year and truly engage our Business Advisory Board in the coming year.