When Christin Badylak-Reals first discovered the ECenter, her reaction was, “wow, this is a place I want to be.” She was nominated to the University Innovation Fellows program in 2015 by her mechanicalengineering advisor and quickly found a home with like-minded students. Said Christin, “the ECenter is the Switzerland of UNH, where students are invited to venture beyond the silos of their major or college to apply their knowledge to explore, create, and develop something new. I engaged in every possible program.”

And engage, she did. Throughout her time at UNH, Christin participated in i2 Passport, the Makerspace, UNH and national competitions, coaching, speaker series, bootcamps, and more. She explains, “The ECenter gave me the opportunity to make the most out of my education by developing real-world skills that you just can’t learn in the classroom. I am a more skilled and effective engineer and honestly, a more valuable young professional because of the ECenter.”

It didn’t take long for Christin to apply the real-world skills she developed at the ECenter and launch her own start-up. “VELV was my first start-up company. It began out of a frustration with current dating platforms and a place of pain for survivors of dating sexual violence,” she said. “I called Ian Grant in June of 2018 when I was on a lunch break at my internship. He suggested I start with customer discovery to further develop my idea. The rest is history.”

By “history,” Christin means that she and her co-founders, Jessica Lavallee ’19 and Matt Ross ’19, built on the skills and experiences they developed at the ECenter and took the idea from inception all the way to the national Draper Competition for Collegiate Women Entrepreneurs at Smith College. “We were the first team from UNH to apply, let alone go to the finals,” she said. “We were thrilled.”

After hours of tireless preparation, a morning spent tabling, and short three minutes pitching their start-up, the team placed in the semi-finals. “Placing in the competition was an honor. A national competition like Draper has you up against start-ups that already have sales and revenue. VELV was still in the idea stage at the time of the competition, so placing speaks volumes to the passion the judges had for our idea and the huge potential they saw in it.” The Draper Competition judges weren’t the only ones to see potential in VELV. Less than a month later, she and the team took first place at Paul College’s Holloway Prize Competition.

Christin graduated in May 2019 and started a position at Dell Technologies a month later. “Without the ECenter it’s unlikely I would have developed the skills that helped land my job as a Pre-Sales System Engineer.” As she starts her career at a global company, she looks back on the long hours and late nights she spent developing her ideas as a student, summing it up by saying, “the ECenter gave me the tools and helped me develop the skills to initiate cultural change throughentrepreneurial activism."