Our Teams and Their Objectives
This website is ran by students in Team Dynamics and Decision Making at Michigan Technological University. Below you will find short descriptions of each of the different teams they are assigned to, as well as links in the headers of each section for more information. Click here to learn more about the facilitating course.
CEO
This team is dedicated to helping push forward the goals of EmpowerUP by encouraging entrepreneurship on campus within the CEO Club, the SBDC of Michigan, and helping and inspiring successful startup CEOs.
Documentation
This team is designed to develop processes and communications with teams to ensure completion of all team objectives and documentation. Some of these include a 3 monthly stakeholder newsletter, a comprehensive semester report, as well as working with the marketing team to work on reports and other materials required for both of the teams.
Entrepreneurial Development Trip
The purpose of this college student trip is to provide 15 students with an immersive, entrepreneurially-focused experience, fostering professional development and exposing them to real-world business practices. The trip will include visits to entrepreneurial organizations, business tours, and networking events designed to inspire innovation, provide career insights, and strengthen connections with alumni.
Husky Innovate
This group is designed to develop and execute plans to promote entrepreneurship at Michigan Tech. They can achieve this by refining and executing a work plan, and collaborate to improve the innovation process.
Marketing/Social Media
This team is designed to increase awareness, engagement, and participation in EmpowerUP through a strategic 11-week marketing campaign, focusing on social media, the website, and collaboration with our other teams.
Outreach – Saturday Academies
Our goal is to provide an engaging environment for local high school students involved in the TRIO program to supplement their learning. We also are working on standardizing and simplifying the current template Outreach uses for these events.
Podcast
The goal of this team is to create podcasts for students as well as anyone interested in post-secondary education. The podcasts are professional, engaging, and informative. The top priorities of the team are to interview guidance counselors, professors, admissions, financial aid, career coaches, current students, TAs, RAs, and local businesses.
Social Innovation and 3D Printing
A 4-student team will explore actionable, low-investment opportunities to apply 3D printing for social innovation. Over 11 weeks, they’ll use design thinking to identify societal challenges aligned with the engineering grand challenges, prioritize feasible solutions, and create prototypes for 1-2 products. The team will conduct customer discovery to gather feedback on the prototypes’ usefulness, ensuring practical and impactful designs. Each member will contribute about 75 hours, taking on roles such as research, prototyping, outreach, and analysis.
URIP Research
The project focuses on collaborative problem-solving and creating a meaningful solution to a real-world challenge within a 10-week period. Students will engage in research, planning, design, execution, testing, and presentation, concluding with a self-assessment. The purpose is to foster teamwork, critical thinking, technical proficiency, and effective communication while delivering a polished final report and presentation.
Website
This team is tasked with managing and updating the empowerupstudents website. Some of this teams goals include updating and optimizing the website, as well as consolidating information, and making it easier and more concise. Our goal is to make this website easy and simple to use for anyone looking for information pretraining to secondary education, and alternatives.
Currently Inactive Teams
Outreach – Mind Trekkers
This team is working to help high school students and their families get ready for college through a conference on November 13, 2024. The conference includes sessions for families on several different topics so that families have a choice on what they want to attend throughout the night.
Outreach – Tech Tutors
This team is working alongside TRIO and Tech Tutors to bring tutoring sessions to local schools in the UP. They provide tutoring and mentoring to underserved students in the area. They strive to develop engaged relationships with both the students and administrators within these schools.