Enactus co-president finds his groove at George Brown
Samuel Lee is the co-president of the Enactus club, and pursuing an advanced diploma in the international business management program at George Brown College. He previously studied general arts for about two years at the University of Guelph.
Lee said that he was not passionate about what he was learning until coming to George Brown. According to Lee, the college offered, “interactive classrooms, (and) experienced faculty with a good hold on the subjects they are teaching.” Lee felt that George Brown focused on students more than universities with enormous classrooms and fewer opportunities for students to interact with each other.
Lee joined Enactus, a volunteer student group focused community projects, in 2014.
“Just going to school alone, I had a lot of free time and I never really did any kind of volunteering, or any sort of getting involved in school. So I wanted to check it out and see what it was like”, said Lee.
He explained that the reason why he choose Enactus is that you meet a lot of likeminded people, make good friends and you actually see the impact you are making in people’s life.
“The big thing about Enactus is stepping out of your comfort zone,” Lee said.
In 2015, Lee became co-president of Enactus. One of the projects run by Enactus is an anti-violence program for young women. The project involves teaching business concepts to the women and aiming empower them as they recover from past trauma.
“We teach how to create a business, like creating a product,” Lee said. “They actually created soy wax candle last year and they called it Tera. The brand is their own.”
In the past, Lee said that Enactus has mainly had business students on the team. “But we really want to diversify and have different students from different programs on our team because you need different perspectives and different people.”
Before joining Enactus, Lee was not a confident presenter. But for him doing a presentation in front of a class saying “I will do it” demonstrates the growth Enactus helps build in its students.
“When students get this kind of opportunity they feel confident as a person,” Lee said. “So being a part of a club like this you really have the opportunities to do it but if you don’t want to then you really don’t have to.”
Lee said he doesn’t like to commit to something that he know he won’t be able to finish. “I don’t value that,” Lee said. “If I take a job, I know I want to do a good job in that.”
