Armani

ProductSC is USC's premier product management organization, a community that teaches students how to think like product managers and gives them real world PM experience along the way. I joined my freshman year knowing I wanted to be a product manager, and this was the closest thing USC had. I learned a lot in those first few months, but I also noticed the club was not really sticking. Events had low turnout, retention was rough, and the community felt scattered. It had potential that was not being realized.

So the next semester, I joined eboard. A group of us who saw the same thing came together and decided to rebuild from scratch. New structure, new programming, new energy. We were not trying to fix what existed. We were building something new.

the ogs

What followed was something I did not fully expect. Interest in ProductSC grew by over 300%. Events that used to pull in a handful of people started filling rooms. We partnered with USC Marshall School of Business to expand the product community across campus, and for the first time, ProductSC felt like a real home for people who wanted to build.

On the external side, I was able to bring in big-name clients like Riot Games, Intuit, Snapchat, and a number of rising startups into our client service program, giving club members the chance to do real product work for real companies.

I also built a mentorship program from the ground up that connects our members to a network of 75+ product managers across different industries, all willing to give their time to help the next generation of PMs figure out their path.

It is one of the things I am most proud of at USC, not because of the numbers, but because of the people who found their place in it.

Avenues Consulting Group is one of USC's premier student consulting organizations. It gives students the chance to try out different types of consulting, from strategy to tech to design, working with real world clients that range from early stage Series A startups to large corporate companies. I joined out of curiosity. Everyone around me was talking about consulting, and I wanted to see what it was actually about. I learned a lot that first semester and genuinely enjoyed the work.

But I started noticing things that were not quite right. Retention was low, community events did not have the energy they could have had, and people were not sticking around after they joined. Avenues had all the raw material of something special. It just needed someone to build it, and I knew I wanted to be that person.

So even though I had never sat on eboard, I ran for president the following semester. I won, and I got to work.

beach outing🏝️

I treated it like a zero to one problem. Instead of patching what existed, I asked what Avenues would look like if we built it from scratch, then went and built exactly that. We made the club a visible presence on campus and interest grew by 250%. I added more community events, built a culture where people actually wanted to show up, and made it feel less like a club and more like a home base for people who cared about the craft.

On the client side, I leaned into my background in external affairs and pushed for bigger names. We brought in clients like Amazon Prime Video and YC-backed startups, giving our members work that actually meant something.

This one is personal to me. I did not inherit a thriving organization. I helped build one. Building communities from the inside out is something I keep coming back to, and Avenues is proof that it works.

I became a Claude campus ambassador about a month before my junior year started. At the time, everyone around me was using other AI tools to get through their assignments, and Claude barely had a presence at USC. Most people had never heard of it.

Me and a group of fellow ambassadors were tasked with changing that. We wanted to build something real, not just hand out flyers and call it a day.

We started by tabling on campus, stopping students wherever we could and getting them to actually try Claude. Then we started going classroom to classroom, pitching directly to students and showing them what it could do. It was scrappy, but it worked.

From that momentum, we founded the Claude Builder Club. A space with no gatekeeping, no prerequisites, just a place where anyone curious enough to build could come and do it. We ran workshops on how to use Claude effectively, how to prompt well, how to make it actually useful for real projects.

Then we went bigger. We partnered with other Claude Builder Clubs across the LA area and launched a Los Angeles wide hackathon where participants used Claude to build their solutions from the ground up. The turnout was something I genuinely did not expect. People showed up, built real things, and left with projects they were proud of.

Being there at the very beginning of all of this is something I will not forget. And we are still just getting started, so look out for what comes next.