Penn State SEDI’s Post

Transcript

I think Clark has just been such a valuable partner and and really allowing Penn State students to be. More confident in being innovative. We started thinking, you know, how do we expand this like Clark experience beyond the Clark Scholars program? The goal of our micro credential program, which we were able to pilot for the first time thanks to the gift from the Clark Foundation, was to provide minority students with different learning currencies that would help them develop both their entrepreneurial mindset as well as their corporate innovation mindset. While we do have credits and even minors that can help students with those experiences, not all students have the opportunity to add those additional credits to their workload. These micro credentials are shorter learning opportunities, 15 hours in duration, so they can get exposed to the different content material. I just completed my internship at a manufacturing company and I kind of was struck by how different the academics was to what I'll actually be doing in the real world. For a lot of engineers especially, we don't get to see the sort of the process of how patents and intellectual property work. So I think at least being exposed to that process and that particular credential is very important. The final project really brought all of the parts of the micro credential series together because one, I could be a leader within my team, but while also working with leaders as well. And we understood that the project was meant for business. So we had to look at the aspects of Sheets and look at what they were doing and how can we change or innovate what they were currently doing. When we approach Sheets about this project, they were blown away. They're they're like we've been doing this work you know for. For years. But like, I didn't, I didn't know schools were teaching it in this way. So the industry has been really accepting and Sheets really went out of their way to to help us because they just really loved what we were doing, The actual human interaction, having to go to Sheetz, observe, ask people questions. I thought that was probably the most impactful part of the whole program because that's something that I might have to do, even if it's just an engineer. In the future, when we make products, I'm going to have to get other people's perspective, understand the actual problem in their. Difficulties with it. In order to produce something that will impact society in a good way, you need a team of people. You need a team of experts. If you don't know how to work with other people that have different ideas than you, different modes of working, you will not be able to accommodate or implement your input to the team. And so I feel like engineer leadership touched on that and how to make everything cohesive within engineering team. I hope to be able to have the ability to be a first, whether it's the first to invent something, the 1st to improve something, and I think the design and the entire culminating project has helped with this. It really introduces you to the skills that at the end of the day you need to use and then the final competition is very fun. You have the opportunity to win. Significant amount of money. So why not? If you're interested, why not doing it? I really want these micro details to be an opportunity for for all students at Penn. We're showing that you know these skills are something that you just you need to strengthen and the better you get at them, the faster you're able to run in the the further you're able to go. My hope for the Clark Foundation program will that we can institutionalized and make this a part of our culture and learning experience for minority students and women on an ongoing basis. We would hope that these students will serve as excellent ambassadors to spread the word so we can get bigger engagement not only here at University Park but throughout the entire. Engineering campuses around the Penn State system.