Priorities:Texas A&M University Student Priorities: Part III

Overview

While Texas A&M University boasts a vast sum of resources in order to facilitate entrepreneurship, its de facto accessibility is lackluster due to the sparse nature of all of the manifestations of the resources. While it may initially seem positive that we have so many different facilities and programs, it leads to confusion, especially for undergraduate students, and creates an inhibitory effect on students who wish to venture into I&E. This leads to the stonewalling of many students from taking initiative for an idea they may have, and this produces, in sum, an unrecoverable loss in ideas, the retardation of innovation evangelism, and limits entrepreneurship in general for the student body. It is imperative that the university organizes the programs and resources in a manner that is intuitive, clear, and easily accessible. 

This page lists directed strategies to this issue and enumerates possible implementations of solutions for each strategy.

Strategies

PROJECT H.U.B.

Current structure is too confusing; organize an umbrella head for all I&E initiatives and programs, with main manifestation being a website.

1. Website that is clear, concise, and minimalistic. 
   

• A student should be able to enter this website and not be overwhelmed by the structure.
  • • Material Design Lite or Bootstrap is a feasible standard
    • Short and easy URL (tamuie.com, ie.tamu.edu, etc)
  • The website should be a portal that any student can use to find out more about I&E at TAMU.
    • Can be categorized by specific perks and benefits of each program to match an individual student's needs
      
  • Plan
    1. Meet with Rodney Boehm, director of EIC, to discuss how to implement the umbrella structure
    2. Meet with directors of different I&E programs and discuss pipelining information to H.U.B.
    3. Sample student opinions to assess what is specifically unfavorable with current website
    4. Outline website structure, full stack diagram and flow chart.
    5. Assemble Team, Develop Website
    6. Test Pipeline, posting, accessibility, sample experience of website from student user data
    7. Launch
    8. Write documentation for future maintenance
  2. Increase collaboration amongst differnt I&E programs to decrease sparsity 
  • Encourage and facilitate collaboration between different (possibly similar) programs in order to reduce degree of seperation between programs and to encourage a more centralized structure
  1. Meet with directors of different I&E programs and learn the programs
  2. Construct a map of possible collaboration initiatives between programs
  3. Contact the individual directors with collaboration proposal
  4. Take proposal idea and survey opinions of users who participated in either/both programs
  5. Solidify proposal, contact intermediary (umbrella head) to mediate the initiative
  6. Launch the initiative
  7. Reiterate

  PROJECT O.U.T.R.E.A.C.H.

  Proactive Outreach: Go to the students, instead of waiting for the students to come to us. Outreach proactive search for student opinion and feedback as well. The students are our customers and we need to engage with them and vice versa, as well as providing an environment for them to connect amongst themselves.

  1. I&E Community
  • ​Environment for students to engage with others who are also passionate about I&E
  • Rapport support amongst students for I&E initiatives
  • Fosters networking, interpersonal learning, and increased engagement and interaction
  • PLAN:
  1. Survey students to see if I&E community is something they would actually be engaged with
  2. Proceed with recruiting said students to be early adopters of the I&E space
  3. Choose a dedicated location for the space
  4. Organize forum leaders to spearhead discussions and dynamics in the room
  5. Encourage leaders to head knowledge sharing session
  6. Encourage referall of other students

  
  

  
  

           2. Increase proactive engagement with students to asess and address contemporary complaints/feedback

  • Cannot continue to proceed in a "directionless" pursuit of I&E at the university
  • The core of any such efforts should revolve around our students and their interests
  • To gauge these, we should have an open line of communication at all times
  • PLAN:
    1. Survery students within I&E community
    2. Survey students outside of I&E community
    3. Construct an open-line for feedback/complaints of I&E related activities
    4. Feed data into a sum and analyze 
    5. Discuss inherent issues of sum and construct plans or plan edits
    6. Iterate

  ​PROJECT C.O.A.C.H.

  • There exists academic advisors to help students navigate through courses and major; why not one for I&E?
  •  

  Texas A&M University Student Priorities: Part I /Jusung_Lee