Stanford names four Toreros as University Innovation Fellows
Photo courtesy of Julia Heaton
Junior Isabelle Ashraf, first-year Reijer den Dulk, and sophomores Julia Heaton and Riley Dean were tasked with examining USD’s campus to find gaps between opportunities and their accessibility, and focusing their research on how to improve the lives of people in the USD community. They were invited to apply to the program by Juan Carlos Rivas, assistant director of the Changemaker Hub, and the $4,000 program fee was funded by President James T. Harris III. The team went through a six-week training over intersession and into the spring semester trying to find those gaps and create solutions to fill them. The six-week online course began during intersession 2018 and finished in February. The course involved readings, meetings, and research, among other things.
Working with the Changemaker Hub, the team worked to answer, “How might we expand existing changemaking opportunities in a way that builds community?”
While the team has a cohesive goal, each student has personalized ways to create an impactful outcome, drawing from their own involvement and experiences.
Photo courtesy of Isabelle Ashraf
Junior Isabelle Ashraf is a marketing major and is also a Social Change Corps fellow in the Changemaker Hub at USD. Ashraf has done fellowship programs before, but appreciates the uniqueness of each student pursuing their own motives within the bigger goal as a UIF.
“It was unique in the way that we got training and then applied it to what we were doing on campus,” Ashraf said. “In that group, we’re all focusing on different areas on campus: I work on Social Change Corps (which supports students wanting to explore changemaking opportunities by providing financial support and mentoring). It was a great opportunity to apply what we’ve learned. All of us have done design-thinking training, but this was a very intensive process to do it.”
Ashraf outlined the process of the program post-application and its training.
“Once you get into the program, you do a six-week online course, so basically looking at systematic change on higher-education campuses,” Ashraf said. “So it’s focused on human-centered design thinking process. One of the main ways we look at different issues around the world from a changemaker perspective is putting the user at the center. So the student is what we we’re looking at, and what problems on campus that we wanted to tackle.”
Ashraf recounted the amount of time and effort she and her team put into the training.
“The actual training part of it was pretty intensive, with readings and meetings and really trying to figure out what we wanted to do,” Ashraf said. “And I think what all of us learned the most was that we’ve done design thinking before, but really realizing how difficult it is. We went back to the drawing board so many different times about what we wanted to do, what the problems were on campus.”
The team saw that students on campus were hoping to get involved, but did not have the best access to discover the opportunities on campus.
“One thing that we really felt strongly about, is that after the Alcala Bazaar, it’s really hard for students to get involved in organizations on campus unless they know the right people, are willing to send a lot of emails, or really find it,” Ashraf said. “Personally, from my perspective, the first thing I did was go on the USD website and pretend to be a new student. It took nine clicks to get to information about student leaders and events.”
Ashraf noted that she herself has noticed this problem within her own time at USD — when she was a sophomore, her friends and people around her wanted to get involved in new things on campus, but gave up because they did not have easy access to different areas. She hopes to streamline the communication process to help students find easier ways to get involved in the campus community.
“You can sign up for as many email lists as you want, but if you’re not on that one email list where that one event’s going on, you’re not going to know about it,” Ashraf said. “There are the students on our campus who want to get involved, it’s just when, how, and where.”
Ashraf believes if her team can increase participation percentages on campus, it will positively affect multiple parts of the community.
“I think it will be able to affect sports attendance, and clubs and organizations as well if we really streamline communication and engage students and have a multifaceted approach for students to find information and the people they want to hang out with,” Ashraf said. “So it doesn’t necessarily have to be Greek Life, it doesn’t have to be the Changemaker Hub, but smaller clubs and bigger clubs that (students) want to be connected to.”
Along with her teammates, Ashraf will continue to strive to foster community at USD for those who want to get involved, but cannot find the opportunities.
Photo courtesy of Julia Heaton
As a sociology and psychology major, sophomore Julia Heaton often studies different social justice issues and big topics within society. Through her experience as a University Innovation Fellow, she hopes to incorporate those ideas into the USD community.
Heaton noticed that the topics the fellows at USD were discussing were not only on USD’s campus, but across the nation and even worldwide. Heaton believes the worldwide connections will help USD’s team progress their own personal goals.
“We had an orientation online from all the fellows all across the world, which was pretty cool because you could see people logging in from Australia, the Netherlands, India — all over the world,” Heaton said. “We had one session where we Skyped with people to show the landscape gap campus for our own campuses and seeing the similarities between different schools across the world was pretty amazing. And the fact that the struggles we’re having, just that we’re not alone in that.”
For her personal initiative within the bigger picture of fostering community, Heaton is pulling from her sociology and psychology background to get students to interact with each other in a beneficial way and form relationships. Her program is still in the prototyping stage, but is moving more toward implementation.
“(My project) focuses on expanding the idea of ‘Dinner With Strangers,’” Heaton said. “It’s something we’ve done in the past, and we’re bringing it back this year, and I’m hoping to expand it.”
Heaton explained the process of how “Dinner With Strangers” works. The last event focused on technology and how we interact with it, affecting our relationships and school. The dinner was family style and 25 different members of the community joined in. From undergraduate students to a retired nurse, there was a wide array of opinions and discussions.
Heaton hopes to have the event a few more times during the spring semester, but ultimately hopes to expand it to reach more students and not limit it to 25 people. She hopes to expand the event to be more like a nonprofit in Baltimore called Thread, on which she originally based her idea.
“(Thread does) community dinners, family-style dinners, to connect students with different people, and they’re based in Baltimore,” Heaton said. “They have 10 people attend 10 different dinners and they rotate every month, so by the end everyone knows each other. So my goal is to expand ‘Dinner With Strangers’ to something like that with the rotating dinners and people are getting connected and then bringing in their friends about the ideas that they talked about.”
Ultimately, Heaton wants “Dinner With Strangers” to grow, but also hopes that the University Innovation Fellows program will grow as well.
“We’re going to the conference in a couple of weeks, so I hope that will give me a bit more context about what other people are doing at other universities, to think even bigger,” Heaton said. “I’m just looking forward to the conference, looking at the bigger picture, then expanding the ideas we have here to grow and reach even further.”
Through the lens of sociology and psychology, Heaton will continue to look out for ways to improve the USD community from a people-based perspective.
Photo courtesy of Reijer den Dulk
First-year Reijer den Dulk was the youngest addition to the team, but that did not stop him from pursuing his goals, as his teammate Isabelle Ashraf explained.
“Reijer is a freshman, (but) he’s a great freshman who knows exactly what he wants,” Ashraf said. “He’s such a kick-ass, so being able to come back and meet him and work with him was such a great experience.”
Den Dulk admitted that his knowledge of USD was limited because he was a first-year, but his experience working as a fellow allowed him to understand the full breadth of what USD offers.
“I got to research parts of campus that I, as a freshman, haven’t been able to experience yet because I haven’t had the time,” den Dulk said. “Researching on the web, working with three other students that I got really close to over the six weeks, I just was able to figure out what USD has to offer.”
Being a University Innovation Fellow is not the only thing that occupies den Dulk’s schedule, however. He is also the residential senator of Missions B, and occupies the chair of changemaking position within Associated Students. He knew USD was a changemaker campus before attending, but did not really understand what it meant. Through his first year, den Dulk has been able to gain understanding of what being a changemaker is.
“USD is a changemaker school because we’re really involved in our community,” den Dulk said. “And a lot of schools are involved in the community, but USD does it in a way that focuses on human-centered design, and with that person in mind.”
Den Dulk explained the idea of human-centered design as focusing on the people of USD when attempting to solve problems, rather than focusing on a bigger system. “I’m in an engineering course right now — it’s Engineering Design — and it’s all about human-centered design,” den Dulk said. “And I’m tying in this course with the Changemaker Hub and going out into the community for this course and I’m seeing changemaking in action, and it’s really cool.”
Through the University Innovation Fellowship program, he hopes to spark changemaking in the Living Learning Community (LLC) program.
“We all had different ideas that worked towards fostering community at USD,” den Dulk said. “My personal one involves the LLC program. I think it can be utilized better to foster community and to promote innovation and entrepreneurship, specifically changemaker, social innovation. I am the chair of changemaking, so I would love to foster a changemaking mindset in first-year students. And the LLC program is something all first-year students are required to be a part of, so it’s something we could utilize more.”
Den Dulk plans to expand the LLC program by aligning the names of the LLCs to actual volunteer experience in the community. For example, if a student was in the Innovate LLC, they would go out into the community and volunteer with something that has to do with innovation.
“We’re really trying to get the connection between the LLC, where you live, your class, and then the community,” den Dulk said. “I think it’s a really great idea and I think it will give students a lot more opportunities.”
Although he and his team have developed a goal for USD, den Dulk echoed Ashraf’s belief that it took a lot of strenuous, hard work to get to the place where they are now.
“(The six-week training involved) a lot of ideation,” den Dulk said. “We would come up with an idea, think about it, talk about it, for hours, days, weeks, and then we’d have to scrap it and start over again. It was a lot, it was time consuming, but we really wanted to identify what the end goal was for USD. We didn’t want to go with the first idea we had.”
All the UIF students have the common goal of fostering community, but in addition to den Dulk’s individual goal, he also has a personal goal outside of fostering community at USD.
“Another goal of mine is that more students every year at USD go through this program,” den Dulk said. “And maybe they’ll have a different goal. Our goal was community, and I’ll keep working on that through the remainder of my years here, and maybe more students are working on something else.”
Den Dulk expressed that even after his four years at USD, he would love to continue helping with the program.
“Once you’re a fellow, you’re always a fellow,” den Dulk said. “You’re a fellow after you graduate. I would love to still help fellows at USD after I graduate.”
Den Dulk will continue to contribute to the UIF program through the rest of his years at USD, and hopes to watch both the school and program grow during his college career.
Photo courtesy of Riley Dean
As the lead of the Changemaker Student Committee, sophomore Riley Dean has already set her prospects on evoking change within USD’s community. Personally, she hopes to expand on the idea of changemaking within the University Innovation Fellowship.
“(The Changemaker Student Committee) organization has undergone a lot of prototypes like trying to figure out what is the purpose of this group, like what do we mean by changemakers, and like what are we trying to accomplish,” Dean said. “And I think now the purpose is more creating a community of people who are interested in social justice issues and those types of topics, and (to) provide them concrete experiences to engage with those issues.”
This semester, Dean has decided to run the Changemaker Hub in a project-based way in hopes of achieving the team’s goal of fostering community.
“There are currently seven different projects going on in the Hub,” Dean said. “And then members can pick and choose which ones they want to be a part of. It’s kind of been like learning through taking action, but then building community within your teams. So far it’s been working really well and we have much better energy, which is awesome.”
Two of the biggest projects that Dean hopes will foster community are My Story and What I Be. My Story is an event on campus where students share stories that have shaped their lives. The goal of My Story is to create empathy and to reinforce the idea that people are more than what they seem on the surface. What I Be is a project in which participants write words on their faces that openly showcase their insecurities, and expose a side of themselves that not many know about.
Echoing the comments of her teammates, Dean explained the intense process the team went through to try to find the ideas and solutions they are proposing.
“We were so excited, it was such a crazy process,” Dean said. “We had a lot of like, late-night brainstorming sessions, trying to figure everything out. We were constantly working on this, but overall we were super excited. And we got really close as a team too throughout the whole process, which made everything more exciting to then finish it together.”
Dean believes that although each member of the team is very different from the others, it ultimately benefits the team’s search for achieving their goal.
“Everyone has a very different personality, but in a sense that gave everyone something unique to contribute,” Dean said. “And I feel like because we were all different, we vibed really well, but we were centered around a common goal too. So we were all trying to contribute what we could towards that.”
The hardest part about the program for Dean is trying to define it. She noted that many people have asked her what it means to be a University Innovation Fellow, and since it is so abstract, attempting to explain it is difficult.
“I think the essence of the program is trying to look at USD’s campus from a bigger picture and creating new solutions,” Dean said. “But we were able to draw off of what is already here. The biggest thing that we found in doing all this research is that USD has so many opportunities for students and they’re kind of hidden away in individual silos. And the biggest issue became connecting engaged students to those opportunities, and that was the common question that then all of our four projects stemmed from.”
When connecting to other schools that also had the program, Dean found that there were many schools who had a similar issue on fostering community. They seemed to have a more difficult time creating the opportunities, whereas USD already had the opportunities — it just needed to connect students to them.
“We found this common theme, which is interesting because we work with a lot of schools from across the world in this cohort too and they almost had the opposite problem,” Dean said. “In the sense that none of those opportunities existed and they were trying to create them, whereas we had them but just weren’t making the connection between them and the students.”
With the goals of all four fellows in conjunction, the team hopes their efforts will ultimately make a difference in USD’s community. Both by drawing from what USD already has and creating new opportunities for students, the fellows will continue to strive to foster community within USD.