Priorities:Boise State University Student Priorities

Strategy #1: Increase Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering

Engineering & Innovation Living-Learning Community

• Freshmen students with majors in the College of Innovation and Design and the College of Engineering live together and take a class which involves community service and team building, as well as aspects of the different majors encompassed by CID and Engineering.
• This Living-Learning Community (LLC) was just established, and thus could be a great place to prototype the implementation of I&E concepts and engage freshmen with these ideas
• This is also a great place to test the effectiveness of LLC's in creating a community across disciplines

Introduce I&E Concepts in Introduction to Engineering Classes

• All incoming freshmen engineering students are required to take ENGR 120 (Introduction to Engineering) or ENGR 130 (Introduction to Engineering Applications)
• These courses are project-based, and teach students about engineering disciplines, as well as developing critical thinking and provides a "design-oriented engineering experience"
• ENGR 130 involves a service project where students work with a client from the community to apply the engineering design process to solve a problem
• While some design thinking is already a part of these courses, there could be room for the addition of more explicity human-centered design principles into the curriculum
• This could also be a platform to introduce engineering students to entrepreneurship concepts that they may not otherwise be exposed to

Promote Growth of Vertically Integrated Projects

• The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program unites undergraduate education and faculty research in a team-based context
• Undergraduate VIP students earn academic credits, while faculty and graduate students benefit from the design/discovery efforts of their teams
• The Boise State University VIP program is part of a broad national and international consortium of universities
• While this program already exists in an early phase, more work remains to create campus-wide awareness about the vision and purpose of Vertically Integrated Projects in order to attract students and faculty to participate in current and new projects
• This program presents an inherent opportunity for a culture of I&E to thrive in a community of students and faculty from different disciplines across campus
• VIP projects differ from a traditional research lab setting in that the experiences, interests, and abilities of all members - faculty and students alike - are valued equally
• Close-knit VIP teams provide an opportunity to support vulnerable populations of students who might not finish their degrees without a supportive community and mentorship opportunities

Provide Opportunities for Entrepreneurship Mentoring to Engineering Students

• The New Product Development Lab, housed within the College of Engineering, mostly provides rapid prototyping and design consulting services to local businesses and entrepreneurs outside the university, but is also a resource available to student entrepreneurs that is not currently well-publicized
• While Venture College's services are available to all students, and they have been expanding their reach to Computer Science majors, this services is still unknown to most engineering majors
• A goal for the future would be to implement a program which partners engineering students with ideas with mentors from the local entrepreneurship community and/or students from the Business College to help them work toward commercializing their ideas (or co-developing ideas for new ventures)

Strategy #2: Promote Collaboration Across Disciplines on Campus

Increase awareness of I&E resources

• Create a one-page website with links to relevant resources
• Advertise the website in department email newsletters across campus
• Have guest speakers introduce I&E for 5 minutes at the beginning of courses
• Promote living/learning communities, MakerLab, and College of Innovation and Design

Improve awareness of Vertically Integrated Projects

Vertically integrated projects (VIP) provide research opportunities to earn academic credit. These give students a practical approach to applying knowledge they learn in class. However, few students are currently enrolled in the VIP program.

Increase connections between students of different majors

The Honors College provides dorms and multi-disciplinary classes to connect students from different majors. Entry/prereq courses are taken by many students, but these are often too early to provide meaningful I&E opportunities.

Host a TEDx Boise Viewing Party

• TEDx tickets are often outside the price range of interested students
• Hosting a live streaming event of the talks woudl be a great opportunity to foster collaboration and creativity among a group of interestd students
• This could be a good "hook" to get students into the event, where we could then direct them to other on- and off-campus resources

Strategy #3: Increase Overall Student Awareness of I&E Concepts and Resources

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Strategy #4: Create a Nurturing and Diverse Space for Ideas on Campus

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Strategy #5: Provide Feedback Mechanisms for Students to Give Input to the University Administration

Implement a student satisfaction survey

• A Likert scale could allow students to rate various aspects of their experience (e.g. I&E resources, quality of education, value for tuition, quality of faculty overall, internship and job opportunities, etc.)
• This survey could be dynamic (e.g. questions could change based on identifiers such as major, part-time/full-time, etc.) to gather specific data about different parts of the student population
• Open-ended feedback could allow us to gather new ideas about what students are interested in

Host an event to generate student ideas for campus improvements

• This could be a workshop, or more of a design sprint or hackathon
• We could break out into small teams and document feedback
• A streamlined report could be addressed to the university administration
• Our partnerships with the MakerLab and College of Innovation and Design could provide conduits to implement some ideas

Provide a social news type system

• Allow student to submit ideas for improving campus
• Each idea/thread can be upvoted or downvoted and allows comments
• Top upvoted ideas for a given period can be implemented or at least get a response from administration