Priorities:University of North Dakota Strategic Priorities

Strategic Priority No.1: Initiating Outreach

Initiating Outreach between the students and faculty on the local and regional communities can highlight the prioritization in three different areas of analysis: entrepreneur education and creativity, engineering education and design thinking, and finally development experiential learning. An actionable agenda will be provided for a simplified overview and implementation.

Engaging in Entrepreneur Education

Working with students in K-12 education as a platform for entrepreneurship can bring major results and ideation into the classroom. By creating and entrepreneur outreach program, college students can aim to educate the younger generations about entrepreneur studies. With the prioritization of creativity in entrepreneurship with the understanding of business skills and strategies, an increase in entrepreneurial activity will occur and benefit community constituents.

Engineering Education and Design Thinking

With many technological disruptors in today’s society, it is clearly seen that the aims of engineering and the possibilities have grown (and will continue to grow) exponentially. The more fluid this technology gets, the easier it is to integrate said technologies in younger demographics. New technology, along with essential engineering concepts can both aid and contribute to the design thinking process of a child’s life. By increasing the design thinking process, there can be deeper growth, passion, and understanding for the sciences that are leading our world into the future.

Development of Experiential learning

The development of hands-on learning has been a main driver for change within the last decade. Educators and students are feeling the effects of experiential learning in many capacities. By taking the creativity and process function from entrepreneurship and the design thinking concepts in engineering, it is only logical to find the best possible solution to implement change that transforms into something dually viable and beneficial to an outreach program.

Strategic Action Agenda No.1:

·         Build a combined team of education students, entrepreneur students and engineering students to preform K-12 outreach

·         Receive assistance from university faculty in the educational, entrepreneurial and engineering concepts that can be communicated to students in K-12 Education

·         Host or facilitate community seminars of experiential learning and highlight the constituents affected, areas served and success stories

·         Develop skills in the university students and the K-12 students

·         Establish a mindset that this university is a friendly and inviting atmosphere for incoming students

 

Strategic Priority No.2: Develop Talent

Developing the talent that UND students possess must be prioritized by faculty in order for a student to grow academically.  There are three main areas where the development of talent can blossom into experiences that shape a student’s ability to take on new challenges: looking at resources at the university, improving the development culture and building a sustainable process to support development.

Resources available at UND

There are so many resources that are available at UND that students can use to find ways to improve their talents in many different fields of study. From the UND Career Center, to the Pancratz Career Center in the College of Business, or even looking to the resources in the various departments on campus. The opportunities are out there. Referring students to capitalize on these opportunities can be the main factor in developing talent.

Looking to Improve the Development Culture

Understanding what qualifies as an acceptable failure needs to be clarified and explored. By incorporating stretch assignments, prototyping, ideation sessions, and brain storming, students can seek out challenges where they can develop without feeling that their mistakes will set them. When realizing that success can grow from failure, students develop a better understanding the challenging processes that occur in our competitive economy.

Building a Sustainable Process to Support Development

Building sustainable processes to support development indicates that project managers should be expected to coach and develop their people. At a minimum, everyone would know what areas they need to improve, and for those with particularly high potential, constructing extra student centered tracks that can be developed. This gives students a sense of where they can go inside the organization. Having a system in place for the potential of the student to be realized is the path to unlocking that potential.

Strategic Action Agenda No.2:

·         Build a system where students can have access to opportunities more readily

·         Provide education about how great triumphs come out of failure

·         Create a maker space for those who want to conduct inventive or innovative ideas, regardless of restrictions

·         Develop an understanding that it takes multiple different experience to make a student well rounded and that those students who do pursue those opportunities are more desirable in the job market.

 

Strategic Priority No. 3 Build Partnerships

The facilitation of networking in a local and regional venue can lead to relationships that can result in tangible change within an area. There are 4 main areas of analysis that can improve networking at UND. This includes the development of strong interpersonal communications and curating the right mix of people, constructing the experience and lasting value, having the shared vision and value as the common goal.  

Development of Strong Interpersonal Communications and Curating the Right Mix of People

Interpersonal skills are the life skills we use every day to communicate and interact with other people, both individually and in groups.  People who have worked on developing strong interpersonal skills are usually more successful in both their professional and personal lives. Employers often seek to hire staff with strong interpersonal skills - they want people who will work well in a team and be able to communicate effectively with colleagues, customers and clients. Curating the right types of people to come to your event, from partners to sponsors to collaborators, to create a great event experience for your attendees to network within. With students coming in contact with various leaders in the community, they will be able to see it as valuable to their personal lives as well. The right mix of people in the right room can feed off of each other’s positive energy.

3.2 Constructing the Experience and Creating Lasting Value

Creating an experience in which co-working on a project is involved is almost always the best way forward. There are some entrepreneurs who openly discuss market applicable ideas and have no apprehensions about doing so. These entrepreneurs know that they are only one person, and the reach and leadership of one person can only go so far in any capacity. Understanding that idea shouldn’t be prioritized, but that the experience creates lasting value and applicable knowledge for their daily life is paramount.

 Shared vision and values

It's important that partners aren't too different when it comes to goals. So that the building partnerships becomes a smooth process that the most amount of constitutes can benefit. With shared partnerships comes shared resources and support. By arriving toward a consensus in the direction in which you are going shows that students from multiple disciplines can come together on issues to solve the problem.

Strategic Action Agenda No.3:

·         Increase the networking promotion opportunities on campus

·         Recruit and provide incentives for students engage in invention and innovation

·         Prioritize team work through cross collegiate partnerships

·         Involve faculty in the partnership process

·         Creating hybrid degree programs that combine multiple talents into a single, less restrictive program.

Student Priority No.4 Establish ventures

Establishing ventures is not necessarily the normal action starting a business and operating for profit. The term venture also can refer to concepts in social entrepreneurship, with collaborative ideation at the forefront. There are two main implications for establishing ventures. First is embracing the alternative though process and finally, leveraging problems as opportunities.

Thought Processes

Changing the paradigm from problem-centric thought is essential to accessing innovative concepts. Problem-centric thought means that we tend to recognize the problems in a situation first. When faced with good and bad aspects of a situation, the bad aspects stand out, while the good are harder to identify. And when it comes to leadership, this norm can be devastating to a team’s productivity.

Leveraging Problems as Opportunities

By leveraging society’s problems and turning them into a beneficial medium, people are able to combine the aforementioned concepts of outreach, talent, and partnerships to create lasting change within a society. Although this seems like a relatively simple concept: when a person combines the talents of many different disciplines and those actions are combined together, there is a high degree of advocacy, communication, values and culture shifts that modify the paradigm of issues on campus and abroad.

Strategic Action Agenda No.4:

·         Build teams of students to solve worldly problems

·         Seek grant and scholarship funding for those devoting their time to these efforts

·         Promote the talented student at the university further on a local, national and global level

·         Craft curriculum that makes graduating with a combined degree in different fields more possible for multiple students