This weekly column will feature the latest topics and tips in the financial world.
Each week, we will focus on a specific financial topic, with topics covering a wide range of financial information and the latest opportunities with the Family Business and Entrepreneurship Club on campus.
If there are any topics or concepts that you would like to see covered in this column, please email editor@etown.edu.

Welcome to the FBE club’s second column! This week, we’ll be writing about various on-campus opportunities to engage with the entrepreneurial world that non-business majors might not be aware of.

The High Center is the third largest family business center in the country and one of the oldest. Housed in Hoover, the center works with a network of more than 100 family businesses, providing them with support by organizing networking events, leadership speaker series, peer groups and an annual Family Business Forum that gathers hundreds of enterprising families, entrepreneurs and executives.

Two or three times per semester, the High Center hosts a leadership speaker series with a featured speaker on campus, typically on Thursday mornings. Their largest event every year, their Family Business Forum, is typically in March or April.

This is an event at the Lancaster Marriott where most of the members of the High Center, as well as students and faculty of Elizabethtown College, come together for networking, a dinner and two keynote speakers. This year’s event is April 16, featuring speakers Alan Mulally of Ford Motor Company and Jackie Freiberg, an author, speaker and business consultant.

Speakers at the High Center events cover topics including succession planning, leadership, sales, nonprofits and a variety of other topics related to business. Not only are the speakers sharing their experience with topics that are relevant to Etown students interested in business, but these events also present an excellent opportunity to expand your network and build your social capital.

High Center events are free for Etown students. All you need to do is to register through the High Center web page. Likewise, students are often unaware that the High Center network goes beyond just official events.

Members of the High Center are frequently speakers in associate professor of enrepreneurship and management Dr. Petru Sandu’s family business courses (FBE 384 and FBE 494), conducting live case study seminars, sharing their experiences, bridging the gap between theory and practice and offering an opportunity to network on a smaller scale with a group of students.

These small-scale experiences are invaluable if you want to connect with business people but are intimidated by the larger, more direct networking that happens outside of the classroom.

Witnessing a successful business person sharing their successes, failures and everyday worries helps humanize them and gives students an organic way to connect by asking questions.

Sandu is also an excellent resource for connecting students with alumni and local business people who are successful entrepreneurs or family business owners. Another opportunity worth mentioning is the Mars Executive Lecture Series, which brings executives from various companies and industries to campus to share their journeys from a college student to a successful executive, and some of the personal and business challenges that they’ve faced along the way.

These speakers are always engaging, knowledgeable and passionate about helping college students understand what happens after college. If you’re looking for a way to get started engaging with business people in a classroom-like setting, check out the lecture series!

If you’re new to the world of business and just want to get a handle on what it means to be a business person, sitting through a few speakers will help you to grasp how much space business has for all different interests and majors.

Thank you for reading! Stay tuned for our next article!