As a part of this year’s Women in Entrepreneurship Week, the Albright Entrepreneurs Village and the WISE Village will come together to host Ladies Who Launch, a dinner and panel discussion focusing on celebrating women in entrepreneurial and leadership roles within different organizations. This year’s event will be held Thursday, Oct. 24 in the Bragaw Activity Room from 5:30-7 p.m. 

Women in Entrepreneurship Week is a movement that is now celebrated in over 160 universities ranging from 46 states and 32 countries. The week was designed to highlight females who have been founders and leaders in different companies and raise awareness for these historically underrepresented women.  

This year’s emcee is Katie Lawson, a second-year student studying industrial engineering. Lawson said she first got involved with NC State Entrepreneurship by just talking to someone at the Entrepalooza event her first year. She is now the first recipient of the first undergraduate entrepreneurship scholarship at NC State as well as an Entrepreneurship Ambassador.     

“Last year, I attended the Ladies Who Launch event and I remember being really inspired by everything they were working on,” Lawson said. “Some of them were older and you always think that you’re going to go to school, get a degree and then get a job whether that be starting something or working in a company, but that event really opened my eyes to the idea that a student can also have a startup company while they’re in school.”

Lawson additionally discussed the impact of the event on students who identify as female and who want to create their own businesses.

“I think really it’s all about the connections that these students are going to make with successful entrepreneurs and successful women entrepreneurs and the ability to just learn from these women’s stories is really impactful to all the students at NC State,” Lawson said.

Haley Huie, the Albright Entrepreneurship Village director, had a large part of planning the event this year. Huie said that this event is a space for students to engage in important conversations surrounding diversity in the workplace.

“I don’t know that people organically have the types of conversations on their own all the time, so I think it just gives a time and a place to engage in diversity topics like this, like women in business, women in leadership roles,” Huie said. “Because there is a dedicated week to that for us, it just made sense to open the conversation from a variety of perspectives and say ‘hey come grab food, have a conversation with us.’ We want to be sure that we’re doing our part to further that conversation.”

Huie also said it’s important for students to attend this event for the value that comes from the ‘ripple effect,’ whether that be joining the entrepreneurship village, competing in the LuLu eGames, or even signing up for a trip.

Tickets for this year’s event were highly sought after, according to Huie.

“We open 100 tickets for that and we are sold out and running a waitlist at this point which is awesome,” Huie said.

For more information or to join the waitlist for tickets, students can visit NC State Entrepreneurship’s website.