Priorities:Union College Strategic Priorities

Overview

Union College is one of a handful of liberal arts colleges that offer ABET acreditted engineering programs. What does this mean? For one, we have a culturally, racially, and gender diverse campus community. Our engineering students are offered exciting academic opportunities outside of the technical engineering curriculum. Academic excellence, variety of competitive sport teams, and an abundance of campus leadership opportunities attract some of the finest college applicants to spend four years studying on the beautiful campus in upstate New York. Students are the primary focus of our professors, who also successfully maintain cutting-edge research projects, and develop new ideas and technologies in sciences as well as humanities and arts.

One has every reason to believe that a school with as tight interdisciplinary connections should be a national leader for innovation, and a catalyst for the transition of STEM into STEAM (where A stands for arts). Well, we are not quite there yet. In general, students at Union are very content (and we have every reason to be), which makes it difficult to identify exact gaps and spaces for improvement. On a 2,200 student campus with The following will be targetted in the six strategies for innovating Union:

A. Encouraging creativity

B. Technology-based learning

C. The visual vs. the verbal/written

D. Innovative study space(s)

E. Campus involvement navigation

F. Engineering and liberal arts in conversation

G. Community division

H. Target career opportunities

After discussing some of these with professors and deans, two clear messages have been communicated over and over again: 

1) Innovation and creativity on campus should not be tied to academics

2) What to do is unclear, but what not to do is crystal clear.

The real question is: how to make busy and overinvolved Union students happy, while also ensuring the happiness of the faculty (which matters in gaining support and funding for just about any innitiative), particularly one that involves a long-term change.

Looking at the Innovation Engine, encountered in Tina Seelig's TEDx Crash Course on Creativity and UIF Meetup Presentation, there are two apparent tracks Union can take:

1) Educate "the Self", i.e. the students

2) Change "the "Environment" on campus.

First would mean incorporating innovative ideas in the classroom environment, and ensuring that innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship find their way into every class, one way or another. The second would mean providing perfect setting for students to explore innovation on their own, outside the classroom, through organizations, design spaces, and projects, which seems to be the preferred approach of Union faculty. To say that both can be implemented right away would be far too ambitious. Take a look a the "creativity combustion engine", as Dr. Seelig would put it:

Strategy #1: Encouraging creativity in students

Tactic #1: A Maker Space

Tactic #2: Course on creativity

Tactic #3: Technology-based learning

Strategy #2: Startup Culture & U

Tactic #1: 

Create a wiki page identifying your top six strategies, in order of priority, that your campus should implement in order to expand innovation & entrepreneurship on campus. Each strategy should address the following question with a resounding YES:

1) will implementation of this strategy result in hundreds, if not thousands of students on my campus being exposed to innovation & entrepreneurship on campus?

2) will the resulting resource be designed to continue on (become a core offering by faculty or students) after I graduate?

If the answer is yes, you've got yourself a strategy! See Breanne Przestrzelski's Clemson Student Priorities Page as a great example.

Your Project

Not all of them will be implemented by you. That would be impossible to acheive as a student (unless you were superhuman). We want you to take a bold 2-3 year view in telling your campus what needs to change in order for progress on the I&E front. Faculty and administration visiting this wiki page should be able to hear 'the voice of the customer', as you've been talking with many students about what is lacking and how things should change to foster more creativity and innovation.

However, the top 1-2 strategies are YOURS... the ones you will work hard to implement as a Fellow. These are the projects that will be listed in Asana. Make sure they are bold strategies that can have a major impact on campus. Imagine yourself standing at the podium at the OPEN conference next year talking about the massive impact your strategy had in making your campus an innovation engine! For those strategies, you will list 6-8 tactics/milestones and the dates you would like to target to acheive these milestones.

TEAM: If you are on a Leadership Circle team, then you will be creating one page together and signing up for the tasks you have the strongest desire to complete.

Each strategy should be written with an eye toward lasting institutional change. For example, holding one Design Thinking Workshop is not a strategy, but systemetizing a regular (monthly or weekly) Design Thinking Workshops that will continue after you graduate... that would be a strategy. If you are unclear, contact Humera (humera@nciia.org).