2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Implementation of an I-Corps Inspired 3-Day Bootcamp for Graduate Students to Plan their Academic Careers

Presented at GSD 7: Innovative Graduate Education

A Customer Discovery Bootcamp was designed and delivered to graduate (PhD and masters) students at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. It was then adapted and deployed at Michigan Tech. The innovative 1½ - 3 day bootcamp consisted of three 3-4 hour sessions plus time to conduct discovery interviews for the graduate students. The Bootcamp content incorporates proven curricula from the Lean Launchpad program (i.e. NSF I-Corps) blended with Life Design curricula (Stanford Hasso Plattner School of Design), and several other innovative educational frameworks.

The UW-Milwaukee team has conducted four wildly successful workshops for ~200 PhD students demonstrating the approach of immersing students in design and innovation activities as applied to individual career paths; this has worked extremely well at the graduate level for participants. Students at Michigan Tech were also interested in relevancy and the tools to build successful careers in innovation, culture, and creativity. The Career Discovery Bootcamp offers these outcomes for participants:
Explore methods for strategically building a career network and testing innovative ideas
Develop/improve problem-solving and opportunity identification capabilities
Improve leadership skills
Explore career paths leveraging knowledge and skills
Seek out opportunities and experiences that develop unique skills to positively impact the world
Identify broader impacts of career interests
Apply innovation and lean start-up methods to skills and career development
Expand perspectives and develop navigational and aspirational tools.

This article will describe the bootcamp content and provide guidance on adapting and developing this professional development opportunity at other institutions. The presentation will also cover content and will include a small demonstration design thinking activity.

Authors

Dr. Ilya Avdeev University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee [biography]

Dr. Ilya Avdeev is the Director of the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s College of Engineering & Applied Science. Dr. Avdeev teaches multidisciplinary Product Realization course that merges engineering design practice with design thinking. Dr. Avdeev is a Director of the NSF I-Corps Site of Southeastern Wisconsin – a partnership of five Milwaukee universities (UWM, Marquette, Medical College of Wisconsin, Concordia and Milwaukee School of Engineering) on commercializing new technologies through Lean Startup training. He is a co-founder of the UWM Student Startup Challenge program and a UWM faculty mentor of the Stanford d.school’s University Innovation Fellows program. He was also a UWM team lead for the NSF-funded Pathways to Innovation Program.
Dr. Adrienne Robyn Minerick http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2382-7831 Michigan Technological University [biography]

Adrienne R. Minerick is a Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering. She earned her B.S. from Michigan Tech and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), ASEE, and, most recently, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). She has served in various administrative roles at Michigan Tech and is a former President of ASEE. She earned the AES Electrophoresis Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022 and was a prior Michigan Professor of the Year Nominee, which illustrates her dual passion for leveraging research and education for student growth and societal advances. While directing the Micro Medical Device Engineering Research Laboratory (uM.D. – ERL), she has managed ~$14.9 million, yielding 104 research graduates, a patent, and >110 publications. Her favorite quote is by Ray McDermott, “Culture is not a past cause to a current self. Culture is the current challenge to possible future selves.”
Dr. Mary Raber Michigan Technological University [biography]

Mary Raber currently serves as Chair for the Engineering Fundamentals Department in the College of Engineering at Michigan Technological University and also serves as PI and instructor for the Michigan Tech I-Corps affiliate within the Great Lakes Region I-Corps Hub. Dr. Raber teaches courses in first-year engineering, leadership, project management and innovation & design. She is a Faculty Innovation Fellow with the Stanford d.school and a Fellow with the Strategic Doing Institute. Dr. Raber also served as Chief Doing Officer for Michigan Tech's IDEAhub, an educational innovation incubator and led a campus-wide effort to re-design the general education program.
Jennifer Gutzman University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Loren G Peterson University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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