The clients are on board, the students are raring to go, and the race to deliver a solution to real issues that our partners are facing, is on. We kicked off the projects with an all hands on deck dinner meetup at the ihotel on February 6th.
After some welcome remarks, Andrew Allen, the director of the Magelli office of experiential learning at the Gies College of Business, explained the vision for such experiential learning courses and the important role of our corporate partners in helping achieve this vision. Barry Dickerson, the senior director of corporate engagement, who has been instrumental in engaging our partners, presented some thoughts.
Our partners, Caterpillar, Country Financial, Graybar and John Deere, gave short presentations on their projects followed by dinner. Since there is no free lunch :), we had the partners work with their respective teams and dig deeper into the challenges.
The students have submitted their engagement agreements this week and working towards an issue tree to help break down the challenge into finer chunks to investigate further. Stay tuned for bi-weekly updates on our blog …..