Priorities:Columbia University Student Priorities

The purpose of this page is to articulate four to five projects we believe would meaningfully improve our campus innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. As part of our training for the University Innovation Fellows program, each of us brainstormed, prototyped, and loosely tested our products. The next step of this project would be to continue to iterate these projects and work with University stakeholders to implement one or multiple. 

1. Promoting student engagement with on-campus events and resources (Lexie Lehmann)

We noticed that students on campus fear overwhelmed with all of the event offerings available to them on and off-campus, as well as the “fear of missing out” felt when students believe that there is a social or academic opportunity that they’re not aware of. In an effort to combat this, we noticed that there were several different websites used to post events on campus but that there were few forums to congregate the events happening on any given day. One of our priorities is to make students feel included and engaged in the Columbia community and to know what opportunities are available to them as a student on this campus in a way that is manageable and inclusive. Originally, we conceived that this forum could take the form of a mobile app, but with feedback from our UIGuide, we’ve decided to look into other ways, especially non-technology ways, to explore promoting on-campus agency and connectivity.

Prototype: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1I3aJlrrSKdovLLb1ZzktWRGIWWSWCKTK844Ah55ciSI/edit?usp=sharing 

2. Developing Student Self-Awareness with a Neuroscience Course Tailored to the Growth Mindset (Lisa Dinh)

Background:

This solution focuses on the problem our Columbia team identified in Session 2 using UIF guidelines: “how might we encourage personal ownership of the campus and institution? Further, how might we promote individual agency within the Columbia experience?” This course has been championed by UIF Lisa Dinh based on her own experiences with the power of understanding how our brains work, heal, and grow in the context of developing individual confidence and identity.

2. Fostering Feelings of Claimancy With Enhanced Public Spaces (Amita Shukla)

Background:

This solution focuses on the problem our Columbia team identified in Session 2 using UIF guidelines: “how might we encourage personal ownership of the campus and institution? This solution centers around making better use of Columbia's public spaces, making them more encouraging to stay in and more inviting by creating pop up installations that suggest to students that they could be niches to return to and claim as one's own on campus. Columbia's campus can often be alienating and unwelcoming, requiring reservations to use even for a few hours, and these open spaces will change that inherent perception.