Changes

<span style="font-size:larger;">A new center for innovation and entrepreneurship&nbsp;is the proposed solution. It uses new academic opportunities, event programming, and startup support to drive a culture shift towards innovation and entrepreneurship.</span>

For our cohort, we've chosen focus on areas specifically involving connections. In the wake of Covid, we faced numerous challenges in terms of connecting with others and connecting with the resources and locations on campus. Our approach will focus on understanding what happened from a broad perspective; getting students to explore campus more; helping students learn about what resources exist on campus; and help give them an opportunity to show off their projects and creations. By reestablishing these connections, we hope to foster a more highly-functioning university, and get students to the place where they can be most innovative.

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=Strategy One: Connecting Students through Sustainability=

<span style="font-size:larger;">Next year the Pavlis Honors College will have a learning community for first year students in the College. This will be a great opportunity to test out some creative ways to incorporate creative thinking into residence hall life. Resident Assistants are currently required to create programs for their students to participate in and this would be an exceptional opportunity to test out some new ideas. Some of these programs that they do with their students make include some of the events such as the Make-a-thon or the 10X Thinking Workshop.</span>

<span style="font-size:larger;">Currently, first year engineering students can be found using their brainstorming and innovation skills in class. These skills are typically not used again until the student reaches their fourth or fifth year and are taking Senior Design or join an Enterprise Team. There are many instances where students have a hard time trying to think of ideas for projects because they are trying to focus on what they have learned from the books, but when they get out into the real world, the answer will not be in the back of the book.</span>

<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:larger;">This retreat would help students cultivate Innovation Mindsets by presenting them with real world challenges, and giving them time to work on finding solutions for these challenges, followed by creating prototypes of their solutions by using whatever resources they find in the surrounding area. On the final day, the students will discuss challenges in the local community of Michigan Tech and how they might go about solving those challenges, as well as other strategies for staying involved in an innovation mindset after they leave the retreat.</span></span>

<span style="font-size:larger;">After creating an amazing collaborative space on campus, there will be plenty of opportunities to host events focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. These events will focus on creating excitement about the new initiatives on campus and recruit motivated students for the new I&E section of the Pavlis Honors College. The Pathways team has been working on bringing in a few speakers, and the student programming board is already planning an event to be held in the space.</span>

<span style="font-size:larger;">'''10X Thinking Workshop''' - An opportunity for students to understand the steps to brainstorming and prototyping an idea. One of these already happened on campus in a small scale, but the hope is to have more in order to reach more students.&nbsp;</span>

<span style="font-size:larger;">StartupTech is an Enterprise team that connects top student talent to student led startups. It utilizes the existing enterprise infrastructure to ensure student involvement by allowing students to work on a startup team as part of their required credits for graduation. Connecting engineering teams to students motivated by turning an idea into a business will help promote business development far more than it currently is at Michigan Tech.</span>

'''<span style="font-size:larger;">Helping IT:</span>&nbsp;'''<span style="font-size:larger;">Once we are able to deliver the above steps we plan to help IT with everything. We plan to help them achieve some of their goals that they have been currently working on in order to promote us as more of a tech school.</span>

We've noted that navigation around campus can be challenging sometimes. Certain locations can be hard to find, and it's always a bit more work to find places for the first time. To help with this process, we're looking into setting up a scavenger hunt to help encourage students to explore campus and find new locations on their own two feet. Learning is always more impactful when you do it yourself.

We think it would be awesome to have people from all around the university get together and show off the things they have made. This should hopefully encourage a celebration of accomplishments and give students an opportunity to be inspired to work on their own projects.

One key area we saw students struggling on campus was their lack of knowledge about university resources. We are seeking to remedy this by investigating the potential for a website and app that could help students discover the various resources and what those resources can do for them.

=<span style="font-size:x-large;">Completed Strategies</span>=