University Innovation Fellows - User contributions [en]

User:Amsantarelli

2023-06-08T16:29:36Z

Amsantarelli: Bio update for 2023

Alex Santarelli

http://universityinnovation.org/images/b/b2/DSC07362_copy.jpg

'''My passion is impacting others through tech, design, music, and fun.'''

UIF Fellow 2018/2019 @ Loyola University Maryland

About me:

I had an unconventional path for my college experience. My first year in college was at Loyola University Maryland where I served as a UIF fellow for my school. After my first year at Loyola, I wanted to work with my best friend Samir and be in a city. So I ended up transferring into New York University. Whenever I didn’t have classes I was working on projects with Samir. We ended up on a whim making Spotify wrapped but for Apple Music because we were feeling left out. An awesome by product of making that app was that [https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/26/apple-music-subscribers-can-now-get-their-own-year-in-review-too-thanks-to-this-app/ TechCrunch], [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/26/18156750/apple-music-year-in-review-listening-habits-2018-app-noisehub theVerge] and [https://www.billboard.com/pro/app-year-in-review-apple-music-noisehub/ Billboard] ended up writing an article about it. Fast forward to the second semester at NYU (Spring 2019), classes weren’t very engaging and I didn’t feel like it was worth the tuition I had to pay as a transfer student.

Looking for something fun to do over the summer that wasn’t working for NYU (I had a job there as a Lead UX Designer, to help pay the bills). I reconnected with my friend Dylan who I met many years ago at Facebook’s F8 conference. Dylan and I met originally because we had both made apps for our high school and were able to attend the conference because we won a student scholarship with our apps. My school app was focused on utility features, his was focused on social features. He ended up raising a seed round and was looking for a founding engineer to help build out the company. [https://www.joinsaturn.com/ Saturn is a social calendar for high schools.]

Late Spring 2019 I joined Saturn and was the first engineer of the company. Saturn was going really well, I loved what I was doing, was learning more than I was in school, and I even convinced Samir to join and be the founding designer for the company. NYU let us take 1 year of absence without having to decide whether we were going to leave school or not. A year after I joined Saturn we were in the middle of Covid; paying full tuition for zoom classes and potentially missing out on Saturn wasn’t something I wanted to do. I dropped out. Saturn grew a lot while I was there. 3 years later when I left due to burn out, we had 50 people at the company and raised a large Series A! The engineering team itself had over 20 people on it. I built the core app experience at Saturn with the help of some incredible teammates over those 3 years. A lot of complex problems that we encountered at Saturn, used human centered design to solve.

The past year I was working at another start up called Fam, which was a houseparty video chat clone and sadly with the state of the market and the app not being a true business, I had to start thinking about what might be next. I learned so much from engineering from the ground up that I wanted to experience how engineering at a large company works. Now I’m at Robinhood as an iOS Engineer.

In my free time I work on various app + business ideas that I get really excited about. Education is something I’m starting to focus on again because I think it is one of the hardest places to institute change, but the most rewarding and necessary. I think the intersection between AI and Education will cause a lot of disruption in ways we can’t even imagine at the moment. I’m also super into music, still iterating on new music app concepts.

Priorities:Loyola University Maryland Student Priorities

2018-02-16T05:08:59Z

Amsantarelli:

= Overview =

Loyola University Maryland, founded in 1852, is a liberal arts university located in Baltimore, Maryland. The Evergreen campus is the main undergraduate campus. Surrounded by a diverse and booming environment the potential for innovation and creativity is high. However, as of present, the resources for such ventures on Loyola’s campus are limited. Creative space for design thinking, prototyping, and research is not established yet, except for limited lab space reserved for the engineering students. Some courses are offered in the entrepreneurship and innovation field but expansion and improvement is needed. With multiple cohorts of University Innovation Fellows campus, we are excited and motivated to improve these aspects of our campus. With many creative and inspired minds on campus these resources, we strive to benefit students across disciplines and majors.

= Spring 2018 Student Priorities =

<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">In the beginning of the second semester, one of our cohort members had a problem: he was looking for the Writing society’s event on <span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:italic; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">Social Media and Rhetoric<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">but he forgot where the event was being held. After running around the Humanities Building and checking every Loyola website he could think of, he realized that only place the event was advertised was on a poster outside Boulder Cafeteria. Running back across the main quad, he found the poster and made it to the event (in Maryland Hall) just in time.
 
<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">After reaching out to friends and classmates, we have realized that this is not an uncommon scenario. We identified the need for a centralized “event board” on campus. Of the many innovations we plan to implement on campus, this event initiative is one of two main projects that we, the 2018 Loyola University Innovation Fellows (UIF) Cohort, plan to roll out over the next year.
 
<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">Through countless hours of meetings and brainstorming, we have developed many ideas that we plan to implement over the next year. Here, we are sharing two of our most exciting ones: the Content Initiative and the Loyola mobile app. The Content Initiative will bring together a cross-disciplinary group of students, faculty, and staff to ensure that information is effectively transmitted across campus. The Loyola App will be the one place where you can find Inside Loyola, Moodle, and Evergreen account information all together. The app will also provide important campus information such as maps, RA contacts, Campus Security information, and an “Events” page tied in via our Content Initiative.
 <span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">From sporting events, to pop up classes, to academic programs, to library conferences, to club meetings, to so much more, there are many activities happening on Loyola’s campus each day. Currently, they are advertised via posters, websites, social media accounts, TV screens, and PDFs. With so many disparate sources of information, it can be very hard for students and faculty to find information about the events they want to attend. From the conversations we had during UIF training, we believe that we can streamline the current content streams across campus to create a more collaborative environment where all members of campus will easily be able to discover what, where, and when events are happening. 
<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">Our UIF training was instrumental in helping us pinpoint the exact aspects of content distribution that we can improve on campus. We used the techniques mentioned in the Landscape Canvas and the Lean Startup processes to determine the exact need for an accessible resource of finding event information around campus. In a conversation with two members of the Marketing and Communication (MarComm) office, Amy Filardo and David Blohm, we received helpful insights on our prototypes for the Content Initiative. They informed us about the circuitous connection between the Event Services database in 25Live and MarComm’s data used on Loyola’s websites. As we discovered, even though there currently is a master spreadsheet of events, there is still room to integrate this database with MarComm’s. We plan to help facilitate the integration of these services, alongside the creation of our app, and hope to increase the conversations between MarComm and members of Loyola’s campus to better meet the needs of the community.
 
<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">The other project we plan to implement is the updated Loyola mobile app. Currently, when accessing their accounts from their phones, students have to go through a four-step process to sign in and access Inside Loyola. To find other information, such as Evergreen Card balances, students must leave that website and login again to a different one. As a result of this segmentation, many students do not know how to find such information on the go.
 
<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">To improve this situation, we propose the creation of a modern iOS app that will cater to both students and visitors to campus. This can build off the previous Loyola app, which provided some of these services but is no longer operations on newer operating systems. During training, we received requests from a multitude of students for this type of system, as they aspire to have a consolidated location for this content. Through a meeting with Loyola’s Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of Applications, we also learned that they are looking to improve this system and we would love to help facilitate this discussion.
 
<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">These concepts are possible thanks to the help of Loyola’s supportive student body, administrators, and the entire UIF team. We look forward to positively improving Loyola’s campus and are excited to begin collaborating with these groups over the next few months. We hope that these projects will help inspire future innovation on campus, and look forward to seeing the impact that these initiatives will have throughout the rest of our time on campus.
 
<span style="font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline; white-space:pre; white-space:pre-wrap">The 2018 Loyola University Innovation Fellows Cohort

== Strategy #1: Increase Student Interaction with Baltimore Community ==

=== Transportation ===

*Convert some of the on-campus shuttles to have routes off-campus for the weekend so that students have a better opportunity to get into Baltimore and interact with the surrounding community.

*Shuttles will have routes to popular locations in and around Baltimore (Inner Harbor, Towson, Fells Point). Routes and destinations will vary, in response to the feedback from students.

== Strategy #2: Streamline Technology Resources for Students ==

=== Loyola App ===

*

== Strategy #3: Create a Unified Repository for all I&E programs on Campus ==

=== Innovation Website ===

*Create an easy-to-use website using Squarespace that will organize all of the out-of-school resources Loyola has to offer (i.e scholarship programs, grants, internships, etc.). The site would also include due dates for applications, direct locations for where/how they need to be turned in, appropriate contacts for questions on the application, and much more. When prototyping, thisas generally well recieved by both students and several faculty member, many of whom were more than willing to help.

*Website will be updated by University Innovation Fellows, ensuring that it is relevant each year. Because Fellows already monitor the school's programs to create our landscape analysis, keeping the website updated will not require them to put in too much extra work.

== Strategy #4: Give Students the Oppourtunity to Disseminate Information With Each Other ==

=== Content Club ===

*

== Strategy #5: Promote Community Service to Help Students Better Embody Loyola's Jesuit Mission ==

=== Promote Awareness of Events ===

*One common suggestion during prototyping was that students often were unaware of the short-term oppourtunities offered by CCSJ and Campus Ministry. Although there is a "Community Service Event Fair" at the start of each semester, students said they often found it hard to find such oppourtunites if they did not sign up for any at the fair. Alongside Strategies 3 and 4, we would like to help complie the oppourtunities from CCSJ and Campus Ministry to help students find oppourtunites they are looking for.

=== Greater Flexibility in Messina Service-Learning ===

*Some First Year "Messina" courses offer service-learning components that students can join to supplement their education. Some students raised the concern that only giving students one week (at the start of the semester) may prevent students from sufficiently weighing their options in joining this aspect of the course. We would like to help First Years better understand the benefits of signing up for a Service-Learning course so that more students join these benefical oppourtunities.
*Students in Loyola's Honors program do not take the 100-level courses which are most likely to offer Service-Learning components to First Year students. Although some of the Honors Messina courses to participate in their own service trips, giving students - and not just those in the Honors program - who are not in designated Service-Learning courses a chance to join actual Service-Learning courses' trips may also increase participation in such events.

= Spring 2017 Student Priorities =

== Strategy #1: Increasing Cross-Discplinary Collaboration while Gaining Transferrable Skills ==

=== Student-led Consulting Firm ===
<ul style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;">
<li><span style="font-size:14.666666666666666px; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline">To maximize undergraduate experience and increase cross-disciplinary collaboration, a group of student possessing technical skills and business acumen would provide business services to fellow students, faculty, and the greater Baltimore community.</li>
<li><span style="font-size:14.666666666666666px; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline">The organizational structure of the business is as follows: Directors of Strategy, Technology, and Operations Under these three departments, there would lie associate and senior consultants.</li>
<li><span style="font-size:14.666666666666666px; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline">For individuals who would like to join the team, but lack the technical or business acumen for whatever reason, the on-boarding process will require a “how-to” module. As an additional revenue source, and to inspire high school students, this module will be provided at a premium fee.</li>
<li><span style="font-size:14.666666666666666px; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline">Based on the early success of the business, there is hope of expansion outside of state [Maryland] lines. Furthermore, to ensure fluid transfer of powers, there will always be a director-in-training</li>
<li><span style="font-size:14.666666666666666px; font-family:Arial; color:#000000; background-color:transparent; font-weight:400; font-style:normal; font-variant:normal; text-decoration:none; vertical-align:baseline">Tenative launch date: Fall 2017</li>
</ul>

== Strategy #2 GENERATING INTEREST FROM THE STUDENT BODY AND FACULTY ==

=== Repair Cafe ===

*The space provides a low risk environment for students to gain basic knowledge of tools and innovation processes. The space will curate a basis for the I&E platform to take off on campus.
*This is a space/event that will take place on a monthly, bi-monthly, or semester basis
*In two to three weeks funding for the first event should be discussed and the idea should be presented to the appropriate deans and stakeholders.
*By March 15, 2017 the date for the first Repair Cafe event should be picked and participants from the greater Baltimore area should be contacted.

=== Pitch Competition ===

*Running in through the Sellinger School of Business
*Name: "Building a Better World Through Business"
*Date: Late March 2017

=== TedX/ Smaller Speaker Series ===

*In order to spark inspiration and passion in Loyola's undergraduate population we will setup an annual TedX event on Loyola's campus
**An appliaction for TedX license has been submitted and another should be submitted as soon as possible
*However, creating TedX events often take many months.  In the meantime we would like to set up a smaller speaker series at various locations around campus.
**By the end of February the first date and location for the speaker series should be chosen
**The first speaker should be contacted (can be Baltimore professional, teacher, or student) by mid-March.
**PechaKucha event may also be considered

== ==

== STRATEGY #3 CREATE A COLLABORATIVE SPACE TO GIVE STUDENTS THE ABILITY TO PROTOTYPE THEIR CREATIONS AND TO INSPIRE OTHERS ==

=== Design Space ===

A design space would allow students to gather and share, collaborate, and inspire, and be inspired by meeting with peers to tinker with prototyping objects such as building blocks, post it notes, 3-D printers, and more. In order to establish this space there are some items of importance to consider and their target dates:

*Discussing possibility and opportunity with university administration (February 2017)
*Conduct further market research (May 2017)
*Settling on a location and creating a legitimate floor plan (May 2017)
*Begin renovations (Spring 2018)
*Renovations complete (September 2018)
*Facility opens to the student population (October 2018)

== Strategy #4 Promote entrepreneurial research projects by faculty - across all disciplines ==

While this priority is largely above the UIF team, it is not completely out of reach to influence.  By making the I&E mission and environment more present on campus more faculty will become intrigued.  By creating a council of professors and faculty, from all disciplines, the UIF team will also get all the schools involved and spread the word.

== Strategy #5 Promote tech advancements and usage across campus ==

=== Pop-Up Classes ===

*In order to teach individuals more about specific technology and give them the tools to properly use it the UIF team will build off the already existing pop-up classes.
*The pop-up classes have already been held for 3D printing, resume building, and music editing technology.
*By the end of February a survey should be sent out to the Loyola community to discover what technology/ classes they are interested in.
*By the mid-March these statistics should be used to form the first student-promoted pop-up classes

= Related Links =

== Main Campus Page: ==

[http://universityinnovation.org/wiki/Loyola_University_Maryland Loyola University Maryland]

== Spring 2018 Fellows: ==

Chris Carangelo

[http://universityinnovation.org/Emily%20Cebulski Emily Cebulski]

[http://universityinnovation.org/Alex%20Santarelli Alex Santarelli]

[http://universityinnovation.org/Grant%20Versfeld Grant Versfeld]

== Spring 2017 Fellows: ==

[[Meghan Reynolds|Meghan Reynolds]]

[[Christopher Tiffin|Christopher Tiffin]]

[[Eric Muchisky|Eric Muchisky]]

[[Category:Student Priorities|Student_Priorities]]

Fellow:Alex Santarelli

2018-01-30T00:58:07Z

Amsantarelli: Created page with "Alex Santarelli [http://universityinnovation.org/images/b/b2/DSC07362_copy.jpg http://universityinnovatio..."

Alex Santarelli

[http://universityinnovation.org/images/b/b2/DSC07362_copy.jpg http://universityinnovation.org/images/b/b2/DSC07362_copy.jpg]

'''My passion is impacting others through tech, design, music, and fun.'''

A little about me:

My father passed away when I was six years old. What I learned from him passing was that I want to defy the odds and people's expectations. I want to change the world and I have a certain force in me that never stops. This force has allowed me to pursue my passion of impacting people through technology by learning to create iOS apps. I have created eight apps to date, ranging from a social network for music, education apps using iBeacons, and a running calculator. My passion has also fueled my interest in meeting new people, traveling to the west, and to start taking those first steps in impacting people's lives. I cannot wait to work and meet you to see all the amazing ideas we have and things we will create.

User:Amsantarelli

2018-01-29T21:59:24Z

Amsantarelli:

File:DSC07362 copy.jpg

2018-01-29T21:55:58Z

Amsantarelli: Headshot for my wiki homepage

Headshot for my wiki homepage

User:Amsantarelli

2018-01-29T21:54:17Z

Amsantarelli:

Alex Santarelli 



'''My passion is impacting others through tech, design, music, and fun.'''

My father passed away when I was six years old. What I learned from him passing was that I want to defy the odds and people's expectations. I want to change the world and I have a certain force in me that never stops. This force has allowed me to pursue my passion of impacting people through technology by learning to create iOS apps. I have created eight apps to date, ranging from a social network for music, education apps using iBeacons, and a running calculator. My passion has also fueled my interest in meeting new people, traveling to the west, and to start taking those first steps in impacting people's lives. I cannot wait to work and meet you to see all the amazing ideas we have and things we will create.