PhD Candidate Profile: Jorge Mejia

Academia + Entrepreneurship: When science meets great business ideas 

Jorge Mejia is not your typical PhD student. He owns his own company and has just finished a six month research and entrepreneurial project abroad with the world’s largest incubator, Startup Chile. He’s working on his PhD in Information Systems at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and expects to graduate in 2016. 

Mejia did his undergraduate and master degrees in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech. Ever since his first internship he has been engaged in a number of R&D projects that have become successful business innovations in their respective industries. 

In 2004, he took an internship with NCR and was assigned to a task as part of a product development project of the “live” interaction system between humans and automatic check-out machines, which you see regularly in major supermarkets across the country. 

After graduating with his MS, Mejia worked in a consulting firm for more than three years and spent half of his time traveling to countries in Europe. He worked with a Swedish telecommunications company in 2006 in research on cable live streaming, which was exactly what Netflix was doing three years later. 

Most recently, he and his company Arrively are researching and developing an app to enable customers to check into “moving objects” – the first of its kind – on their smart phones. If Foursquare helps you find the perfect places that are stationary, this app allows you to check-in on a particular bus, train or flight and review your transportation experience, not limited to the carriers. 

“I enjoy research,” said Mejia, “and I always try to find interesting research questions that would solve real problems.” 

In 2012, Mejia and his college friends formed a team to participate in Startup Chile, a six-month $45,000 budget accelerator program backed by the Chilean government, which selected 100 early-stage start-ups out of 1000 applicants worldwide. Mejia conducted research for his PhD project within the incubator to see how the entrepreneurs were using their money and time. 

“Six months and $45,000 – you can use them for product development, or traveling to raise money, or going to networking parties for mentorships or come up with new ideas,” said Mejia. “I wanted to measure the outcomes of these different approaches.” Mejia is currently finishing the data collection for this project. 

“We screwed up a lot,” he said, noting that they lost a teammate in the beginning and they couldn’t find a developer. “It was also our first time meeting with an investor,” Mejia recalled. “It was all about real-world learning.” 

Mejia appreciates the support he received from the Smith School. “[The level of support] is unconventional for a business school,” he said. “My advisor and the school were not afraid to take a chance on me.” 

Now, Mejia is looking at areas that could combine his strengths in academia and entrepreneurship. “I love research and there are so many cool problems in the intersection of business and academia,” he said.  

For more information about Jorge Mejia, you can contact him via email.

- Yang Zhao, MBA Candidate 2014, Office of Marketing Communications