Engineering Sophomore Named University Innovation Fellow

Sarrah Truong ’18 ECE

For the third consecutive year, the College of Engineering has continued its commitment to entrepreneurship by sponsoring a University Innovation (UI) Fellow. Sarrah Truong ’18 ECE has been named a UI Fellow by the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter). Funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Stanford University in partnership with VentureWall, Epicenter looks to empower undergraduate engineering students to become advocates for change at their schools. The Fellows, in turn, aim to become leaders and provide their peers with the skills, knowledge, and attitude to succeed later in life.

Sarrah, one of 155 students from 47 different institutions to receive this prestigious accolade, is looking to expand the popularity of the Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship (ICE) Institute on campus, as well as introduce more students to entrepreneurship-related minors. Pursuing a minor in engineering entrepreneurship herself, she understands how important these skills can be. As she explains in her UI pitch proposal, “We hope to use the two minors [Engineering Entrepreneurship and the VSB Entrepreneurship minor] to establish an even greater culture of entrepreneurship on campus by creating more competitions between students, running cool events, and planning workshops that appeal to students of all colleges.”

Additionally, Sarrah believes collaboration is an important skill that is not stressed enough in the classroom: “I believe that students learn best, not only from their teachers, but from each other as well. I have found the best classroom sessions that I have been a part of are those in which students and the professor are engaged in debate or a discussion…In my perfect classroom, the students ask the questions and guide the discussion.”