Entrepreneurship

Experiences:

I have taken numerous courses in my major that are considered electives for the ENTR minor. These courses are ENME 204, 444, 482L, and 489. 204 is an intro to design, 444 is our capstone/ senior design class, 482L is Controls Lab, and 489 is Global Engineering. Altogether these make up 11 credits of classes that have been spread out over my Junior and Senior years. Through these classes, I have been able to design both real life and theoretical products, come up with business plans, and worked with diverse teams. They have taught me what it's like to start from an idea and to make it a reality, something that's important if I ever want to become an Entrepreneur.

Silver:

A completion of four courses that satisfy electives in the Entrepreneurship minor (200+ hours)

• Global Engineering (ENME 489)
• Introduction to Design (ENME 204)
• Controls Lab (ENME 482L)
• Senior Design Capstone (ENME 444)

These courses allowed me to face challenges that would be faced in the real business world; trying to manage a team and resources, trying to meet deadlines, working with a customer, getting funding, and so on. These are all valuable, real world skills that can be used and applied when trying to take on any of the Grand Challenges. The projects done in Global Engineering related to my challenge the most, as a lot of them were focused on providing resources to developing nations, however the design skills used in any of these courses could benefit in building a clean water system.

Learning Objectives:

Program Learning Objectives:

Teamwork

• All of these classes entailed group projects, both with randomly selected groups or groups chosen on our own. In both scenarios, teamwork was critical, and we learned how to work together, resolve conflict, and in the end get a final product we could be proud of

Persistence

• In each class, we faced a lot of pitfalls while during our project and had to redesign multiple times. We had to learn how to persist through these pitfalls and take on any obstacle we faced

Perspectivism

• As mentioned, we faced a lot of obstacles and had to redo our design over and over, which gave us the perspective of what these projects are like in industry

Realistic Vision

• On my Senior Design (Capstone) project, we realized about halfway through the semester that in order to make our prototype function as we wanted, that we would need a much higher budget than what we had available. We chose to be reasonable, and have a realistic vision that turned our project into a proof of concept rather than a fully functioning prototype

Entrepreneurship Learning Objectives:

Develop strategies for recognizing opportunities and identifying the tools for quality risk assessment

• For the Global Engineering course, we would either be given a material or a country, and had to come up with a business/project to institute based on this. We had to choose an idea based on opportunities available through the constraints, and we would have to do a risk analysis on our project.

Exhibit skills for communicating ideas in a concise and logical way

• In all of my project courses, we had to give project updates and give presentations in order to concisely and clearly update the prof3essor and our peers on our project.

Work effectively in teams focused on entrepreneurship-related projects

• All of my projects were team based and were often entrepreneurial in nature.

Apply entrepreneurial thinking to social issues and social problems

• In Global Engineering, we did projects in which we had to come up with an entrepreneurial idea in order to solve a major social issue in an assigned country.

Demonstrate an understanding of real-world entrepreneurship

• In my capstone project, we ran into a lot of the roadblocks an entrepreneur has. We had budget constraints, people unwilling to help us, and even people who simply wouldn't respond to us. This was a good learning experience for challenges faced in the real world.