It all started when…

Years ago, the Shidler College of Business was known simply as the College of Business Administration, a group of 11 of us (Colin Yu, Waynele Yu, Reiko Lin, Leslie Menor, Jill Asakura, Leighton Tamura, Blake Yoshimura, Melissa Proctor, Wai-O Hui and Michael Nakamoto) started out to create what would become known as the Business Executive Society of Tomorrow. We all came from various business disciplines and were also in other undergraduate clubs at Shidler. We wanted to create a small, tight-knit group of students, who were looking to network with professionals and work on skills that would make them more marketable for employment after graduation. The goal was to have only "active" membership as opposed to being an organization with members in name only. We decided that the organization structure would replicate a business and the various departments would apply what we were learning in theory.

BEST was founded under humble beginnings. Over the summer, we held a couple of car-washes and quickly realized that seeding the club with money from our student jobs was a more efficient way to come up with our starting capital. The founders all put in $50 or $100 to seed the starting finances. For the entire year, we held all of our events at no or low cost venues (mainly on Campus) and even prepared our own pupu for the inaugural Professional Interaction Night. The entire first year was magical as we were able to recruit successfully, win our first Super Clubs Day and leave a small financial cushion for the following year's operating budget. Our only goal for the first year was to recruit and make sure that the next generation would be able to continue on from a better position than we had started. Fast forward to today and the count and quality of the alumni is amazing. BEST truly has an amazing legacy that so many alumni are willing to participate in.

Best,

Brad Araki