Priorities:University of Louisville Student Priorities

Project Pitch Video

Overview:

University of Louisville is a public institution located in Louisville, Kentucky. University of Louisville is a university known for its medical research, dentist school, and engineering (Speed School). The university has focused more recently on expanding its engineering school into one of the premier engineering schools in the country. The students have many things to enjoy besides academics including the diverse community with thousands of unique restaurants, and more recently huge strides in maker spaces.

The University of Louisville has a more recently expanded entrepreneurship program. The program focusing on the business aspect with not much interaction with the other departments. This mirrors that of the other departments who are extremely independent in their actions of their programs. The amount of required classes that allows different departments to interact is to zero. This is a major concern for a lot of the resources, makerspaces, industrial parks, etc, that thrive when there are a lot of interactions between different types of people.

Strategy #1: Expand students to different brands of innovation.

Tactic #1: Create an entrepreneurship club to bring the departments together.

           

The divide between the departments is getting to a point where innovation and entrepreneurship can’t expand anymore. It is horrible that many students don’t know that startup weekends, hackathons, and design-thinking workshops occur less than 100 feet from the campus. The potential for great innovation is so close and can be used by any student, but no students know about it. This is where the club comes in to bring different people from each department together to attempt to share experiences and the potential for entrepreneurship. The club would have a focus of not only going to the nearest maker-space, but go to each of the main three maker-spaces which focus on different things entirely. There are a lot more mechanical engineers at one maker-space, more computer scientist at another, and more variety of majors at another. If we could give different departments a glimpse of the “other side”, then we would have a great barrier broken. The goal for this club would be to start going to varying hackathons starting in the beginning of the year.

           

Tactic #2:Focus on the STEM engineering Garage.

           

At the university of Louisville the focus for the money and sponsorships is the STEM majors. This lead to the university building an engineering garage for all of the competition teams(SAE teams, Robotics teams, and Rocketry teams). The engineering garage only supports STEM classes as well, and many other majors look confused whenever the term engineering garage is used. Moreover, if there was a location in the building used for business classes this would allow for a major divide to be dropped because most people who are involved in the engineering garage practically live there and if other majors were there, a connection would automatically be drawn. Moreover, a plan to get at least one business class to teach should be the next school year(fall 2016).

           

Tactic #3:Bring departments into a different maker spaces.

If you aren’t a STEM major, you are likely to have never even heard the term “maker space”.  The first time experience of seeing a makerspace in action is truly breathtaking especially for someone who hasn’t experienced the wonders of making. To be able to create a bridge between the parts of the university (STEM and nonSTEM) there needs to be a common ground. Everyone there is a local hackathon in the beginning of the year and usually one small start-up. The goal is to bring at least one person from each department to either of these by the middle of 2016.

           

Tactic #4:Create a design class around bringing departments together.

Currently, as previously stated, there is not a multi department class past your freshmen year. This really needs to be stopped and one of the easiest way to do this is to make it a part of the “flight-plan”, or list of courses you are required to take to graduate. A class focused on bringing people together, giving people a familiarity with engineering, business, and arts, and communication would be an invaluable class. The simple idea of the class would be to go to at least one of the three main makerspaces(First Build, Level1, and Water-step) for a startup weekend, hackathon, or a workshop based around an aspect of a department. The class would have a goal of being an optional class by Fall 2017.