For those on the fence on accepting the invitation to Grand Challenges or thinking to apply or not for next year class I wanted to give you some comments from the parents overview and students feedback.
- The program is simply great!
- From the parent point of view I felt that my S was in great hands living in a community of like minded individuals fully engaged by faculty and university officials, including the school president.
- From the student point of view my S comments at the end of the semester were that it was the best decision that he made and single most fulfilling experience of his freshman year at Tech. I have heard this from many other students too.
- You will be working in a multidisicplinary work environment right away. This is in a nutshell is what you going to do in the real work after you graduate from college. As a recruiter myself, I can tell you that this is a huge advantage when you are interviewing for internships,co-op, or full time.
- You are tackling real challenges and there is not limitation on what you and your group can pick to work on.
- Offers a lot of extracurricular activities where you can unwind from the school environment.
- You will end up expanding yourself. For example, my S just finisihed his 1st year but his team has decided to continue next year (Grand Challenges has an optional 2nd year) with their project. He is an AE major, and yesterday he had a team meeting and he volunteered to learn Java during the summer on his own as it is a skill set that the team will need for their next project phase. Likewise all the team members distributed work within themselves to do during the summer so in the Fall the hit the ground running. Talk about commitment… they feel they are doing something good for the world.
- Get further exposure with faculty. After they presented their final posters they received calls from 6 different professors from different departments willing to help them develop their project further and mentor them.
-As parents I can say that this program went well beyond expectations. We can see how our S has evolved during the year to be more self confident, assertive, and have a clear ownership of his future.
If you are thinking to apply or debating on accepting or not the invitation my suggestion is to not hesitate and do it. There are only 110 students per school year that have the opportunity to go through this experience.