Priorities:University of Delaware Student Priorities
Contents
Encouraging Collaboration Between Engineering and Business
Engineers tend to be interested in innovation, but do not have an interest in entrepreneurship. They would rather pass this responsibility on to someone else. This separation of interests is not inherently problematic, as members of teams typically have different areas of expertise. Engineering and business students can have great success founding companies together. The issue on campus is that there is very little collaboration between these fields. Technical clubs and business clubs do not interact much.
A project that can help tackle the issue would be to form an Innovation Council. This council would exist to share opportunities between the many clubs that otherwise do not interact. The council would meet once per month in a setting where members from different registered student organizations (RSOs) could meet each other and make connections. The council could also establish a showcase session, at the beginning of each year, where different groups can present their projects to potential collaborators. While a detailed timeline remains to be established, the project can be implemented over Spring 2015.
Project 1: Innovation Council to Organize Innovation Centric RSOs
To implement this project, the steps that need to be taken are:
- Identify RSOs that would be interested in being part of the Innovation Council
- Reach out to RSOs leaders to present our case
- Identify schedules of each RSO to come up with a date and time where maximum people from each RSO can attend a common meeting
- Present the objective of the Innovation Council to RSO members at the first common meeting
- From the first common meeting, identify the needs of each RSO group that could benefit from a collaboration
- From the first common meeting, establish (or refute) the perceived benefit of the Innovation Council, based on feedback from RSO members and leaders
- Proceed with the formation and registration of the Innovation Council, and establish a location, time and day of monthy meetings, based on the information from steps above
- Establish metrics (number of people attending each meeting, number of collaborations between different RSOs) and an online database to collect meeting minutes, which would help with continual validation of the Innovation Council
Encouraging engineering students to take entrepreneurship courses
Through our interviews and research for the University Innovation Fellowship (UIF) program, we identified multiple course offerings related to entrepreneurship and technology innovation. What we found, however, is that the number of engineering students taking these courses was very limited.
Investigating the issue further, we found that courses related to entrepreneurship and technology innovation would typically be classified as "breadth electives" for an engineering student. Next, we checked the college of engineering breadth requirement list for the most recent year. We finally realized that entrepreneurship and technology innovation courses were not explicitly included on the list, while a lot of other courses were specifically included on the list. The result was that it was not clear whether or not courses related to entrepreneurship and technology innovation count towards breadth requirements, and students generally resorted to selecting breadth electives from courses that were explicitly mentioned on the list.
We presented our findings at the stakeholder meeting, and we found that the undergraduate director for biomedical engineering had been working on clarifying and modifying breadth requirements. To that end, we would like to work on inclusion of entrepreneurship courses in the breadth electives list, which should encourage students with an interest in the field to take those courses.
Project 2: Inclusion of entrepreneurship courses in the breadth electives list.
Eliminating Fear of Judgment
On campus we have found many students have a fear of judgment. This is evident by watching a lecture. Students during the lecture will not answering questions when the answer is obvious. This fear translates into not coming up with new innovative ideas. The students body is afraid that someone may think their idea is sill or will not work. Since the students are so afraid it decreases all of the schools innovation and entrepreneurship.
Project 3: Set up a 10,000 pitch day. Everyone on campus is forced to talk about an idea they are passionate about. The pitch can be a startup or a change you want to see. During a few hours of the day everyone will be forced to talk about their idea. This will help the students get over their fear of being judged.
Fostering an Environment and Influence Among Peers
It's quite a known fact that environment has a large influence on students and the way they might approach activities outside of the classroom. Focusing on the environment within UD, we believe that students need to be surrounded by the peers that strive to do that same things they aim to do. Whether that's excel in the classroom, to start a new RSO, or to pursure groundbreaking research, we believe that you become the average of the top 5 people that you hang out with. As a result, we'd like to propose an initiative that would provide a place for students to immerse themselves among peers they want to be influenced by in their area of interest, an environment where students feel as if they were all working towards similar goals and shared ambitions.
Project 4: Revive the Delaware Design Institute and develop progress in moving it forward. We believe that the DDI is a place for students to pursue and explore interdisciplinary collaboration, a place to understand and employ design processes on impactful projects. The DDI will serve as an institute that supports, promotes, and fosters design as a tool to interdisciplinary collaboration.
- Re-establish the steering committee and committed faculty along with administrative support
- Begin re-recognition of DDI as a campus initiative
- Secure a space on campus to act as the grounds and head space for DDI
- Ensure the Integrated Design Minor courses are available for students to participate and take