Wellesley, Massachusetts
Mara Steiu is a Class of 2020 global scholar at Babson College in Massachusetts and an ed-tech entrepreneur.
When she was 17, she worked on creating a mobile game that would help high school students from her native Romania get financially educated. After working with multiple teenagers--and being one herself--she realized that the education system in her country didn’t offer youngsters the necessary support (knowledge/inspiration/connections) to give life to their ideas, take calculated risks and be bold. Therefore, she launched iXperiment, the first start-up accelerator for Romanian high school students. This is a lab in which teenagers work on their most creative ideas to solve social problems, improve people’s lives and create innovation by having access to the resources and knowledge of top entrepreneurs from Romania or abroad. So far, iXperiment has empowered high school students from all over Romania to launch their businesses and create value in fields such as education, hospitality and IT.
Steiu’s’s initiatives have so far been featured in publications such as The Huffington Post and Forbes Hungary, as well as at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, have won a TEDx award for social impact and have been presented in multiple national/international conferences, such as the MiSK Global Forum in Saudi Arabia. Her long-term goal is to use ed-tech to disrupt old, outdated education systems.