Schulich iBBA graduate chosen for The Next 36 entrepreneurship program
TORONTO, ON – Friday, February 6, 2015 – The Schulich School of Business is proud to announce that iBBA graduate Dhaman Rakhra is one of three York University students with extraordinary entrepreneurship potential selected to participate in The Next 36 program.
Dhaman Rakhra, who graduated in 2014, as well as Manjeet Kaur and Khady Lo Seck, students at York University’s Lassonde School of Engineering, will join a group of 35 other Canadian students and recent graduates recognized for their extraordinary entrepreneurial potential.
The Next 36 entrepreneurship program participants were chosen from more than 630 applicants from leading Canadian and U.S. schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Yale, who competed at a National Selection Weekend in January.
For seven months, these 38 young entrepreneurs will be mentored by Canada’s top business leaders, taught by some of the world’s top business faculty, and work to earn funding from top venture capitalists.
“Schulich is proud that iBBA graduate Dhaman Rakhra has been named among The Next 36,” said Dezsö J. Horváth, Dean of the Schulich School of Business. “Schulich nurtures the entrepreneurial skills of our students through our cutting-edge curriculum, through mentoring and coaching provided by our Entrepreneur-in-Residence, through our annual Start-Up Day new venture competition, and through case competitions such as the Hult Prize, where Dhaman and his team first presented their start-up idea.”
Rakhra is co-founder and CEO of REACH Diagnostics and an associate with PricewaterhouseCoopers’s technology and communications group. He was a member of the 2014 Schulich Hult Prize finalist team that was selected from teams representing more than 10,000 students from schools around the world, including Harvard, MIT and Oxford, to pitch their social enterprise concepts to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus for a prize worth $1 million in seed funding last September.
Rakhra says he is excited to represent Schulich in this year’s cohort for The Next 36. His social enterprise start-up provides high-quality, affordable screening, diagnostic and monitoring tools to address non-communicable diseases for individuals living in urban slums and has been featured in Fast Company, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, as well as by Marc and Craig Kielburger in their Huffington Post column.
Supported by more than 200 business leaders across Canada, including W. Galen Weston, Jimmy Pattison and the late Paul Desmarais Sr. as founding patrons, The Next 36 provides world-class academic instruction, business mentorship and venture building to the country’s most promising entrepreneurs.
About Schulich
Known as Canada’s Global Business School™, the Schulich School of Business in Toronto is ranked among the world’s leading business schools by a number of global surveys. Schulich’s MBA program is ranked #1 in the world by Corporate Knights, the world’s largest circulation magazine with an explicit focus on Corporate Social Responsibility, and #2 in the world by the Aspen Institute (a Washington, DC-based leadership think tank) in global surveys that identify which schools are doing the best job of preparing future business leaders for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business. Schulich’s MBA program is also ranked among the world’s leading schools by The Economist, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek and Expansión, Mexico’s leading business publication. The Kellogg-Schulich EMBA program is ranked #1 in the world by The Economist, and #1 in Canada by the Financial Times of London. For complete ranking details, please visit www.schulich.yorku.ca.
For more information, please contact Elayne Shapiro at (416) 736-5546 or eshapiro@schulich.yorku.ca.
