This certificate (handout) will enable students to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and critical dispositions necessary to leverage the power of innovation to achieve personally meaningful and socially significant impact. It is grounded in the belief that each of us can do great things.

The certificate is open to all majors, and can be a useful addition to any academic program for students that want to learn how to apply their disciplinary knowledge to achieve real-world solutions.

This program will provide tools and concepts to synthesize research from courses across disciplines in social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and engineering— from across campus as well as across the globe. Students will identify a problematic condition or asperational future and be supported to research, design, and implement an innovation focused on applying the insights and skills from their majors to bring about a better future state in society.

Student Projects

Student projects could include:

• Producing a service to support use of health apps for patient-managed healthcare
• Creating a resource management game to decrease society’s ecological footprint
• Designing a card game to help people understand complex ethical issues
• Leveraging off-the-shelf software to build an application to increase volunteerism
• Establishing school and community garden plots and curriculum for learning projects
• Developing a middle-school curriculum to increase student learning and engagement
• Building assessment routines to assess socio-emotional learning and team collaboration
• Developing a crowd-sourcing application to map out neighborhood strengths
• Creating impact guides to help parents use commercial games as career gateways
• Assessing the impact of a designed innovation to achieve stated goals
• Applying disciplinary expertise to innovate toward a better future

Plan of Study (15-18 credits)