Priorities:Smith College Student Priorities

Overview

Smith College is a small women’s college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. With our liberal arts education, few requirements, and encouragement to think collaboratively, Smith students have developed interdisciplinary mindsets that thrive on an innovative campus. With three makerspaces on campus, classes in design thinking and entrepreneurship, and workshops for faculty, Smith has an abundance of resources to help cultivate innovation within the student body. Yet, due to lack of advertising and lack of reaching out, many students with great ideas have missed the opportunity to develop them further. Our goals, which are detailed below in greater detail, will help foster this growth and awareness of innovation on campus. From a concentration to a maker market, our goals engage with students in a variety of settings in order to reach out to a wider set of scholars. While this is our first year with University Innovations Fellows on campus, we hope to start a dialogue amongst students, faculty, and the administration in which we instigate change and advocate for a more entrepreneurial campus.

Strategies for change

Strategy 01: Encouraging and Improving I&E Culture Within the Student Body

Innovations Concentration

Program Pitch: The Innovations Concentration is a combination of currently available design thinking and entrepreneurship courses that will provide hands-on education in innovation among students, provide students with entrepreneurial internships, and will go a long way towards strengthening the I&E culture on campus. There are two tracks to choose from: Entrepreneurship & Innovation or Design Thinking & Innovation.
The concentration targets around 10-15 people from each class year, who will apply to join the concentration. After the selection process, students will have to take 5 classes related to the concentration as well as complete two learning experiences. Classes for the concentration will be pulled from the school’s current curriculum, and more courses could be added if there is a large amount of interest from students. The concentration’s template is listed below:
Innovations Concentration Template:

1. A gateway course (could be partial credit)
   1. Entrepreneurship & Innovation Track: Introduction to Innovation
   2. Design Thinking & Innovation Track: Introduction to Design Thinking
2. A group of courses in the curriculum which students choose 4 or 5 from a variety of departments: Economics, Engineering, Architecture, Landscape Studies, Interdepartmental Courses or other related departments
3. 1 or 2 practical learning experience (internship, independent study, service learning, etc.)
4. A capstone experience

In order to make our concentration a reality, we will need to first connect with faculty members interested in being a part of the advisory committee and discuss the potential of the concentration on campus. We will also collect information on faculty interest in the program. While we are gaging our faculty interest in the innovations concentration, we will also research student interest through advertisements, mini-workshops, and surveys. This will help us shape our concentration curriculum, and we will then submit the proposal with demonstrated student interest to the Committee of Academic Priorities for approval. Finally, we will reach out to alumnae for necessary funding and take steps to advertise and generate student awareness, with special focus on incoming and current first year students. Once we complete these steps, we believe that we will be well on our way to completing our concentration.

Maker Market

Program Pitch: The Maker Market is platform for students to sell [only] the fruits of their creativity/labor (this could be room decor, room contraptions, gadgets, digital developments, paintings, food, hand crafts, ornamental things, hand-made jewellery or keychains, plants they grew, etc) to other students. This will function as both an opportunity for students to exercise their creative confidence, launch potential start-ups in a safe environment and receive feedback before stepping into the real world, and provide a place for other students to buy cheap, homemade items.
The Maker Market will target students in all year levels, with no limit on the amount of students interested. Our market will target two main groups: students interested in learning about running a small business, and students interested in purchasing homemade goods. For students wanting to sell, the market will give them a platform to test their product, receive feedback, and possibly even make sales in a safe, low-risk environment. For buyers, the market will give them a place to buy one of a kind, handmade items. Based on interest in the market, we would reach out to the Design Thinking Initiative or the Student Government Association to see if they would donate materials to use for prototyping.
In order to create the Maker Market, we will need to first set up a space for the market, ideally a physical space so that sellers can get in-person feedback on their work. Next, we will start advertising the concept, sending out emails, making posters, and even hosting small meet-ups for creative people to work on their start-ups in a shared space. We will also reach out to the Makerspace club, to see if they would be interested in working with us to create the Maker Market. Ideally, these will generate student interest and start to build a community interested in sharing ideas. While we are not sure of the frequency of the market, we believe that this space will encourage innovative thinking within the student body.

Strategy 02: Developing resources for post-graduation pursuit of innovative and entrepreneurial ventures

Innovators’ Mentorship Program

Program Pitch: Innovators’ Mentorship Program is an initiative that helps students grow and build their ideas on a large scale by matching interested students with faculty members, alums, and affiliates who have knowledge in the industry or field of study that a student is exploring. Mentors will guide students, provide advice and insights, and could help network students so that their ideas can be executed on a full scale.
This mentorship program targets 30 students ranging from all years. They will be selected based on an essay describing why they are seeking a mentor in the innovation space and what ideas they want to develop further with this mentor. The matching process will be a mutual selection process -- students choose their most interested areas and mentors give keywords relating to their expertise. Students can either take a Special Studies or produce weekly reports on the progress. A team of faculty members interested in the development of innovation will form an Advisory Committee to track the process and get feedbacks from mentors. The Lazarus Center (Career Development Office) and The Conway Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (CIEC) holds regional meet-ups, annual mix & mingle events, and one-day trip to the mentor’s office locations.

Strategy 03: Encouraging innovation among faculty

EduStudio:

Program Pitch: EduStudio allows faculty to develop and design new teaching tools, methods and assignments and experiment with new and innovative techniques. Besides giving students and teachers a new way of assessment, EduStudio will benefit viewers who can learn about key concepts in a more engaging, concise way.
EduStudio will encourage faculty to innovate, while also reaping educational benefits for the student body. While EduStudio is a fairly fluid concept, its main use is to assist faculty with creating new teaching tools and methods as well as to improve existing grading methods to make them more experimental and to encourage students to explore homework assignments deeper and more creatively. While we are unsure of what the final product will be like, we want to work to make collaborative spaces for faculty to learn how to incorporate creativity into their curriculum because creativity will help encourage students to be more innovative. We hope to speak with faculty and gauge interest, and will ideally work with the Design Thinking Initiative to brainstorm and facilitate workshops in educating professors in alternative teaching methods.

Project Pitch Video

Smith College Project Pitch Fall 2016

Other Related Links:

Smith_College

University Innovation Fellows Fall 2016:  

Amanda Lavond, Mandira Marambe, Lingxuan Li, Jessica Innis, Yi Wang