Rice Education of the Future report reveals need for leadership, entrepreneurship opportunities
The Rice Education of the Future initiative’s final report suggests that students’ experiences outside the classroom, such as entrepreneurial, mentorship and leadership experiences, need the most improvement, based on results from the Student Association’s campus-wide survey and a separate survey of 400 students.
“Basically, students are pretty happy with the academic experience they get,” SA executive vice president Trent Navran said. “What they see that’s lacking in their experience is opportunities to be entrepreneurs, opportunities to be leaders and opportunities to be mentors. I’m particularly interested in how do we get those three things to be in a bigger part of our learning experience.”
The final report has made seven recommendations under the categories of “resource intensive” and “low resource.” Entrepreneurship organization and space is one of the resource intensive recommendations, according to Navran, a McMurtry College senior.
“When it comes to entrepreneurship, we don’t want to just give people money, or have a course or two,” Navran said. “Those things are great. But what we really want is eventually a space where students can yearly go there, have legal and financial resources, can have mentors, entrepreneurs and leaders who are there to support them, a little incubator space.”
Navran said another recommendation is to offer courses that provide students more applied, direct and experiential learning.
“[We suggest creating] new courses that take this design process you see for engineers that bring into social science setting, going out into communities, taking field trips, whatever it is to make things more real, more tangible, more relevant,” Navran said.
Other recommendations include strategies to improve alumni-undergraduate relations and teaching quality. Details are available on the Student Association website.
Navran said the first stage after the final report is communication, making sure everyone knows the survey results.
“The results have been shared with the Board of Trustees,” Navran said. “We are circulating it with different participants of our initiatives. We have a bunch of focus panels, where we have students, faculty staff, [and] the administrators talk about certain issues, whether those are entrepreneurship or teaching excellence. So across those 10 panels, we are going to be sending these results.”
After the communication stage, REF is going to determine the specific actions for implementing the survey result and set up action teams, according to Navran.
“We want these action teams to be students who will be at Rice for the next couple of years, who care about those specific issues and [are] able to drive forward with the administration and fellow students,” Navran said.
Madhuri Venkateswar, a member of the REF task force, said action teams will be crucial in keeping the REF initiatives sustainable.
“Action teams are going to be multi-year,” Venkateswar, a McMurtry College sophomore, said. “We are looking into creating action teams this semester and having them [carry] over into next semester as well. Putting people on the project is a very important facet of [REF survey results]. [They are] just to make sure that it doesn’t dissipate.”
Navran said he also plans to pass legislation on the final report in the next two weeks.
“I want to pass legislation that supports the efforts and the ideas that have come out of the initiative,” Navran said.
Venkateswar said legislation is a way to institutionalize REF’s final report.
“We want to make sure that there is student support,” Venkateswar said. “Especially for things in the long term, it’s on file. If the students support this, that can be referenced in the future.”
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