Recently, as a part of my work as a UIF fellow, I got to attend the Silicon Valley meetup in Palo Alto with two other current fellows from Smith (we missed you Beth!!). The University Innovation Fellows program is a program of the Stanford d. school -one of the cofounders is a Smithie, and is co-sponsored by the design thinking initiative and the Conway Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Smith. We were inducted in the past summer, went through six weeks of intense online training under the help and guidance of our amazing UIGuide, and have continued to work on our project which aims to “foster an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship on campus.” We have made enough progress in the fall semester that all four of us were invited to the Silicon Valley meetup! We listened to talks at Google and Stanford d. School, engaged in group activities and workshops on design thinking, innovation and machine learning, and of course, met some pretty awesome people. Our project will debut on April 13th. It will be a busy next few weeks but I am really excited to see how it turns out!
