Entries by uifellows

Bottling the Bay Area and Stanford Magic

Student Ambassadors travel to Bay Area, attend Stanford E-Week [wpvideo Jczop8dN] Nine top-performing Student Ambassadors had an immersive experience in Silicon Valley last week to bring back best practices to their campuses. Some may say, “What happens at Stanford can’t be replicated in our region!” Perhaps not in its entirety. But, we think by breaking […]

Stanford E-Week and Bay Area Stomping Grounds

Student Ambassadors arrive to SFO today, hitting Stanford’s signature Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series first, followed by the popular Spirit of Entrepreneurship course. These two offerings represent ingredients in ‘secret sauce’ at Stanford and Student Ambassadors will be attending both. Among the other amazing things planned is a tour of Google and PayPal… and the […]

Only Students Could Have This Kind of Impact

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJNOi_UqZhs&w=560&h=315] TEDxWakeForest Student Ambassador Christina Oelsner had tough shoes to fill. Last year’s Student Ambassador Lucy Lan rocked the campus with a sold-out first-ever TEDxWakeForest to share ‘ideas worth spreading’ and infuse innovation and entrepreneurship into the dialogue at Wake. Not only was Christina tapped on the shoulder to be a Student Ambassador with […]

We Believe Students Can Change the World

NCIIA and Epicenter are pleased to announce an expansion of the Student Ambassadors program. The program, founded in 2009, trains student leaders to promote entrepreneurship and venture activity, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines, among their peers on college and university campuses throughout the U.S. Today’s announced expansion consists of a six-session […]

Entrepreneurship on College Campuses

Here’s a great infographic for why student ambassadors are leading the charge to create entrepreneurial ecosystems on their college campuses. Click on the graphic to see the larger image and read the post “The Rise of Entrepreneurship on College Campuses (Infographic)” by Diana Ransom, Contributing Editor of Young Entrepreneur. ~ Humera Fasihuddin, Manager of Student […]

Record 4,500 Submissions to U-Michigan 1,000 Pitches

The 5th annual University of Michigan drew a record 4,500 submissions to its 1,000 Pitches Competition. Organizers announced winners in each of the nine categories. The competition, led by campus organization M-Powered, invites undergrad and grad students to submit 3-minute videos of their technology or business pitch online. From the organization’s website, the competition was […]

Speaking of Cooper Union, Rachel Maddow Show!

Cooper Union history and sit-in, which started Monday, is highlighted during last night’s Rachel Maddow show. School administrators may begin charging tuition (presently a free education for every student) to make up for annual operating losses. Learn more by watching the Rachel Maddow show here. A group of Cooper Union alumns bought the students pizza […]

Huffington Post Article on Cooper Union’s Invention to Venture (I2V)

Congratulations to Cooper Union Student Ambassador Sharang Phadke who held his first Invention to Venture (I2V) and received a terrific mention in a Huffington Post blog piece, In the End, We Are All Entrepreneurs, by John Pavley. I2V is a day-long event is a crash course for University-based scientists and engineers interested in seeing their […]

Exploding Pumpkins!

What do exploding pumpkins and design clubs have in common? Elliot Roth, our Student Ambassador Candidate from Virginia Commonwealth University. Read all about it at the new post published by our collaborators at the Epicenter…  

Why Student Ambassadors?

Today, we are starting our new online training for 8 student ambassador candidates. This departs from our typical format of bringing 20 or so students to NCIIA headquarters in Hadley, MA to indoctrinate them in the lessons that make a great student ambassador. The online training consists of six one-hour sessions with experiential learning during […]

Brilliant Student Innovations Address Global Challenges

The NCIIA grants program is one that has given rise to numerous student-led companies. Actually, given that NCIIA has been around for 17 years, many are ‘all grown up’ and employ hundreds of people, garnering millions in economic impact…. but I want to highlight the ones that one might classify as ‘International Development’. If you’re […]

Secret Agents of Change WANTED!

Secret Agents of Change WANTED! Become a Student Ambassador. NCIIA and Stanford University, as partners in the Epicenter, are pleased to announce a new online training program for the Student Ambassador program. We are accepting a maximum of 12 students. Students should expect to put in between 1-5 hours a week during training. If you […]

E-Boards, Awesome Boards and Gigantic LCD Screens

Flyers, sidewalk chalk drawings, tweets and Facebook events are some of the usual suspects when it comes to campus promotional methods… but giant whiteboards? These days Student Ambassadors are deploying creative methods of reaching out to fellow students with the message that innovation and entrepreneurship are happening activities on campus. We first learned of the […]

Sparking Entrepreneurship at UC Davis

On Monday October 8, 44 students and 2 professors came together for the first ever Engineering and Technology Entrepreneurship Club (E-TEC) general meeting at UC Davis. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students from all engineering disciplines on campus were represented. Students from chemistry, biology, and business also attended the meeting. The event consisted of […]

How to Pick Great Speakers

Who better to tell our Student Ambassadors how to pick great speakers than Matt Harvey of Stanford Technology Ventures Program. As Content and Communications Director at Stanford, Matt is responsible for finding some of the great speakers who come talk to Stanford engineers within the Entrepreneurial Lecture Series class. Most of these talks are made […]

Epicenter Retreat, Sierra Camp at Lake Tahoe

NCIIA Staff are together with Stanford partners at the Epicenter Retreat where close to 75 Engineering Deans, Faculty and Administrators are engaging in an ‘Unconference’. Participant tweets reveal teams engaging in prototyping, discussion of online courses and more. Tune in to the hashtag #epiretreat for more.

2011 Student Ambassador Featured in New York Times (Print Edition)

“The Theil Fellows, Forgoing College to Pursue Dreams,” reads the front page of the  of the New York Times. Reporter Caitlin Kelly writes on September 15, 2012 about Eden Full’s pursuit to commercialize her low cost solar device while on paid leave from Princeton. Eden first trial of her high school invention was in Kenya […]

UT Austin – Student Entrepreneurship Conference

UT Austin – Student Entrepreneurship Conference

Good Afternoon NCIIA,

On Saturday September 15th the Technology Entrepreneurship Society and Scientific Entrepreneurship Society are teaming up to co-host the first ever UT Student Entrepreneurship Conference to provide the student body with exposure to the startup community at UT. The event will consist of two panels, a student startup showcase and free lunch thanks to the Austin Small Business Development Program. We have recruited the best faculty, staff and private sector startup experts to share opportunities available to undergraduate and graduate students on-campus and around Austin. Click on the URL for more information about the panelist and to RSVP. Yours truly will be there to assist the hosting organizations and find potential NCIIA grantees.

– Isaac Daniel Sanchez 

2013 Student Ambassadors

Intelligent. Creative. Ambitious.  These are words that come to mind as I reflect on the 19 Dean and Faculty-appointed students who will complete the intense 4-day training today and become an official 2013 Student Ambassador. They arrived as one and they leave united and committed to SPARK innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly within engineering and science […]

UTHSC Hosts TEDMEDLive Simulcast

From April 10 to 13, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center hosted a TEDMEDLive Simulcast on its Memphis campus, inviting about 250 local health care professionals to participate in each day’s events.  TEDMED gathered 1,200 adventurous thinkers and doers from a wide array of medical and non-medical disciplines at the Kennedy Center for the […]

Students find Pathways to Healthcare Innovation

Harvard successfully hosted its second event on Student Pathways to Healthcare Innovation last Wednesday, April the 25th.  Four speakers talked for fifteen minutes each on their experiences and advice for traveling in the biotech entrepreneurial world.  Dr. Youseph Yazdi, the Executive Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design, inspired the crowd and especially […]

Baruch & NYU Science for Good Team: SunCulture

I met Charlie Nichols at an event for aspirational entrepreneurs I put together last April. Fast forward one year, and Charlie has a team, company, and a good shot at winning the NYU Social Venture Competition. Charlie is a co-founder of SunCulture and an Economics student at Baruch College. He worked in Senegal with Teaching […]

Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) to Speak at UCLA

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, author of The Lean Startup, and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow […]

Biomedical Innovation at the University of Southern California

Here at USC, technology innovation and inter-departmental collaboration is a big priority.  Recently, the Coulter foundation granted $5M to USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, Keck School of Medicine, and Stevens Institute for Innovation as part of their Coulter Translational Research Partnership Program.  As far as I can tell, a large chunk of this money is […]

UCLA – The Ecosystem of an Entrepreneurial University

A Conversation with: Dr. James Economou, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research Dr. David Feinberg, Associate Vice Chancellor, CEO UCLA Hospital System Dr. Al Osborne, Senior Associate Dean, Anderson School of Management   Moderated by Roy Doumani, Executive Director, UCLA Business of Science Center  This conversation focused on how the speakers view the value of innovation and […]