More than 200 students and business representatives attended the United Latino Students Spring Business Leadership Conference, which focused on helping students build professional and networking skills, at Cal State Long Beach on Saturday.
The ULS is made up of 13 Latino business-based organizations from Southern California universities. This event, held annually, was hosted by the Hispanic Student Business Association (HSBA) for the first time and included keynote speakers such as James Alva, Frank Medina and California Assembly Member Tony Mendoza.
Alva, a graduate of Stanford University and now associate business director of the Small Business Development Center, offered a message for students.
“[Don’t] lose sight of what the big picture of your dream is,” he said. “Make sure you are doing random acts of professional kindness.”
He also urged students to do good things without expecting anything in return, but as a matter of courtesy.
Senior business major and vice president of HSBA Marlon Mirales said: “When you graduate, it’s not so much your degree. I mean, your degree helps but another thing that gets you in the door is knowing different people, how to network, so this is the other thing that’s happening [here] — you’re networking with different people, different individuals, people who will eventually be part of Fortune 500 companies.”
Students from all the different universities had a chance to interact during eight skills-developing workshops.
Cal State Dominguez Hills student Brittany Givens attended the “Road to MBA” workshop.
“I’ve been very motivated,” she said. “It makes me think outside the box about what I want to do in the future and start planning ahead with continuing my education with my master’s. I’ve never really thought about it and now … it’s really made me think about what I want to do and how to plan for it.”
Jocelyn Rodriguez is currently president of HSBA and plans to run for ULS president next year in hopes of being in charge of all ULS chapters and expanding the organization to universities in central and northern California in the near future.
Marco Egurvide, resource economics major and HSBA member, was grateful that the event was held at CSULB this year.
“Last year, they had it at Cal State LA and we felt that we could put on an event like this and would make it bigger and better,” he said. “We had a really good team to be able to do that.”
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