The future nonprofit is currently seeking funds through grants and donations, and preparing to launch its spring and summer programming, which Tran says will focus on competitions and scholarships for high school and college-level students. Tran’s mission for the organization is to critically engage and elevate student voices on world issues, thereby effectively crowdsourcing fresh perspectives and ideas from the next generation of leaders.
Tran knows that the concept of student competitions is not necessarily unique, but he hopes that ChallengeUS will grow to be more multidimensional and multidisciplinary than current offerings.
“This spring, we’re only going to offer speech and essay competitions because they are the easiest to do simultaneously and the ones that my team and I have the most experience in,” Tran said. “But in the long-term I hope we can do pitch competitions, policy-thons, research competitions, case competitions, general scholarship competitions, and more.”
Tran’s foray into business wasn’t always a part of his vision for himself. It wasn’t until the second semester of his sophomore year at USC that Tran took his first Marshall class. He credits his emergent interest in business to his time working at the Institute for Youth in Policy, where he founded and led an in-house incubator. Combining his enthusiasm for organizational management and entrepreneurship with his passion for policy and impact, Tran sought to find projects that were meaningful to him and others in his community.
Upon discovering USC Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab and its Undergraduate Impact Scholars program, Tran was able to further his vision for himself and his goals through the nine-month cohort-based mentorship program. Specifically, he gained real-world advice and experience from two of this year’s BSEL Undergraduate Impact Fellows: Andrea White-Kjoss and Jen Chiou. White-Kjoss is Managing Director at the Long Beach Accelerator.
“She played a big role in making me even more comfortable with entrepreneurship and diving headfirst into it,” Tran said. “There was always a little bit of trepidation. A little bit of a feeling that I could stay in between the two spaces [business and political science], but what she does is squarely in the world of entrepreneurship.”
Their conversations not only helped shift Tran’s mindset, but they also helped him better understand social entrepreneurship. “You can be a for-profit business and still have a tremendous social impact,” he said.
Tran also benefited from meetings with BSEL Undergraduate Impact Scholars Fellow Jen Chiou. Founder of CodeSpeak Labs, Chiou was able to share her journey from management consulting into social entrepreneurship.
“Jen and I have very similar backgrounds,” Tran said. “She’s given me advice on starting ChallengeUS, but also strategies on how to grow and scale it — and grow myself as a serial entrepreneur.”
In terms of growth and scaling, Tran emphasizes that having a sustained and measurable impact will be key. Social impact measurement is a field that is still developing, particularly because indicators can often be qualitative or contextual. For Tran, the biggest key performance indicator (KPI) for ChallengeUS will be the amount of scholarship dollars ChallengeUS awards.
“I want to eventually be able to give away tens of thousands to each winner,” he said. “So that winning the scholarship isn’t just prestigious but meaningful in helping pay for an individual’s education.”
