Changes

<span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent;">Before we start to explain this topic, let’s introduce the fellow who helped start it all.</span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent;">..</span>

<span id="docs-internal-guid-cd69de4f-7694-8a62-feba-19d5401d36cc"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent;">In many cases, students may have great ideas but do not know how to make them happen. Because of this lack of empowerment, Meenu Singh helped create a program at the University of Maryland called innovation coaching to help empower students to make their ideas come to life. By showing students how to be more creative and innovative as well as by connecting them to resources and people that can help them in the classroom, innovation coaches encourage all students’ ideas and essentially become a guide or mentor to show other students that they hold the power in their ideas.</span></span>

<span id="docs-internal-guid-cd69de4f-7695-26e2-3d6d-a0ce4133e776"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; background-color: transparent;">Innovation coaching is a peer-to-peer program that allows students to coach or mentor other students at their university. These coaches help foster innovation in other students by answering any questions students may have, encouraging students in their ideas and projects, connecting students to helpful resources, and being a liaison between students and professors. In addition, innovation coaches may help professors modify course curriculum to allow for more creativity and innovation in classes. Innovation coaches are not TAs, though they work in the classroom much like TAs. Instead of being an aid to professors, innovation coaches are present to help students specifically. They are able to answer questions and translate information from professor to student and vice versa. In many cases, innovation coaches are able to help empower other students to see that they can make their ideas a reality.</span></span>

<span id="docs-internal-guid-4f532e36-76c0-328f-f1c3-af56e65ced35"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 2013, the University of Maryland took the time to create an innovation center of their own, the </span>[http://innovation.umd.edu/ <span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: transparent; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center</span>]<span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, to benefit their proud Diamondback community. Unfortunately, the students didn’t know what it would be used for and assumed that it was just another building dedicated as a campus incubator or site for seed-funding. Yet fortunately, Meenu was not only a Fellow but a member of UMD’s student government, meaning that she was both tasked with aiding in the designing of the center and was led with her passion for higher education and the need to revolutionize the student curriculum. Her first actions along with 19 other students and a mentor (who specialized in human centered innovation), were to implement the </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Design Thinking Process.</span></span>

<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Here’s their </span>[http://innovation.umd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/PIC-Role-Description-and-Application-1.pdf <span style="font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: transparent; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">PIC application</span>]<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 14.6667px; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">!)</span>

== Outcomes of the Project ==