Priorities:Florida Institute of Technology Student Priorities
Contents
Project Pitch Video
Overview
Florida Tech has also recently been names as one of the Top 50 Entrepreneurial Universities by Forbes, which is a testament to the purpose efforts undertaken in recent years to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. As a private institution, Florida Tech has a history of high-quality undergraduate engineering education. However, Florida Tech has yet to realize its entrepreneurial potential due to a lack of formal training and education in entrepreneurship of faculty, the administration, and students. Largely, only a few faculty initially spearheaded the entrepreneurial endeavors, but as with many culture-changing endeavors, the current champions seek to create a critical mass of followers, adopters, and co-implementers.
Strategy # 1: Increase interdisciplinary collabration for student capstone projects
Tactic # 1: Create a pilot capstone design program incorporating college of engineering and college of business students
Currently, students spend an entire year at FIT developing an almost industry-ready designs. Many times, these designs go on display at the university, but unfortunately, do not go much further than this. We are trying to incorporate business students into these projects to create successful businesses out of these projects that students work long hours developing.
Tactic # 2: Amalgamize all individual departmental capstone courses into one overarching, univesity-wide capstone course
Senior Design is currently run by each individual major. Multidisciplinary projects exist far and few between, which is a disservice to the students as well as the university. We wish to eradicate the current major-specific senior design program and make cross-major projects more commonplace, if not required. This gives a more in-depth experience of a real industry project.
Tactic # 3: Get industry members to advise and sponsor the univeristy-wide capstone projects
We wish to see more industry-sponsored projects as capstone projects as well. We have had many successful projects sponsored by companies like Northrop Grumman, Harris Corporation, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and more. This interaction not only helps students feel the real experience of being an engineer in these companies, but they often are offered jobs as a result. Additionally, with the funding provided by the sponsor, these projects are of minimal cost to the university, enabling other unsponsored projects to receive more funding.
Strategy # 2: Create awareness about existing facilities for Innovation and Entreprenuership
Tactic # 1: Hold an innovative desgin challenge with emphasis on using indicated facilities
We wish to hold a student design event, where we will gather in a highly traveled campus location to have the maximum amount of participation (i.e. Dining Hall, Gym, Senior Design Center). We will hold a competition to engage students to utilize as many of our campus resources as possible (i.e. Machine Shop, Electronic Support Lab, Fab Lan, Innovation Center, Library, etc.).
Tactic # 2: Conduct a rapid design comptetion using articles acquired from a scavenger hunt
The competition will be such that all students have the ability to participate in as well as staff and faculty to create a campus wide day of fun. It will be challenging and thought-provoking, but no major will have an advantage. This is good to reach out to the community as well as the students and their professors.
Tactic # 3: Hold an Innovation and Entreprenuership Fair
We wish to hold an event to showcase all of the innovation that students have been involved with. Some students may have been a part of a big project during an internship or maybe some students invented something in their dorm. If it is innovative, we want to see it! This is a great event to hold to encourage collaboration on projects going forward. If you have a good design, but you do not have the skills to code a stellar User Interface, you may attract a fellow student to help you out at such an event and more.
Strategy # 3: Start a Student Council
Tactic # 1: Hold the first student council meeting
Florida Tech has many great organizations like Tau Beta Pi and Society of Women Engineers that get students involved in projects related to their major and creates networking opportunities. However, it’s difficult to plan collaborative events with other organizations. The objective of the student council is to oversee and plan collaborative events between the engineering and business clubs and societies at Florida Tech. For example, SC would be in charge of planning E-week where we can have guest speakers, competitions and seniors and organizations can showcase their projects. Overall, we want to show others how our students at Florida Tech can apply their knowledge learned in class solve real world problems.
Meeting Agenda:
· Each organization president will introduce themselves.
· Dr. Schlegel will explain KEEN’s role in the foundation of the Student Council
· Team building competition
· Present why each president should join the student council.
· Announce next group meeting. (Meetings will be twice a month).
Tactic # 2: Host Florida Tech Engineering Week 2016
Engineering Week will be from February 22,2016 to February 27,2016.
Tactic # 3: Group Industry Projects
We wish to hold an….
Tactic # 4: Channel of communcation
We wish to hold an….
Tactic # 5: Form a board of advisors
We wish to hold an….
Tactic # 6: Launch as a separate organization
We wish to hold an….