Rowan University’s “Think Like an Entrepreneur” Academy, offered annually through the Lawler College of Business’s School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, saw approximately 90 high school students from four states participate this summer. Students who completed the free, four-day program were eligible to earn three transferable college credits.
Sponsored by TD Bank and produced by the Rowan Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (RCIE) at RCB, the program encourages high school juniors and seniors to apply an entrepreneurship perspective to the challenges posed by the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“This generation is passionate about global issues and wants to make a meaningful impact,” said RCIE assistant director Jessica Vattima, who runs the program with Mike Dominick, a senior lecturer in entrepreneurship.
Now in its eighth year, TLAE is enrolling about 30 percent more in-person students than any previous class.
Students worked in small groups to brainstorm solutions to a variety of UN Sustainable Development Goals, from providing health care where it is needed to ending hunger.
Jeffrey Schwantes, a junior at Kingsway Regional High School in Woolwich Township, is part of a team working on developing a prototype mobile clinic.
“Our idea is to provide free health care to low-income areas of the United States,” Schwantes said.
“We serve areas that don’t have much access to quality health care,” said teammate Devon Kodish, who will be a junior at Moorestown High School.
Sophia Counselor, a senior at Kingsway Regional High School, said her group aims to eradicate hunger in the South Asian country of Sri Lanka and decided one way to do so was to use high-quality fertilizer to improve crop yields.
In 2021, the Sri Lankan government temporarily banned chemical fertilizers to promote the use of organic produce, but the pesticide ban has reportedly led to worsening crop yields.
“The idea is to mix food waste in giant composting machines and then sell the fertilizer that results to farms to increase their crop yields,” Counselor said.
In addition to collaborating in small groups in the business hall, students expressed their ideas and created physical models of their concepts through projects in RCIE’s “maker space,” Studio 231. They also worked with faculty and Rowan University students in Creatives 230, an experiential learning lab designed to connect the creative fields with entrepreneurship.
Dominique attributes the increase in student attendance to RCB’s growing reputation as a top-tier business school, as well as the concept of uplifting humanity through entrepreneurship that’s embedded in TLAE (last year, the Princeton Review ranked Rowan University’s entrepreneurship program 40th in the U.S., up 10 places in three years).
“These goals are meaningful and noble and students can relate to them,” Dominique said.
He also said high school students are attracted to programs that use cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence to help them get more done, faster.
“We use AI tools to develop various solutions such as imagery and innovative designs,” he said, “and we also use AI for marketing and communications projects such as website copy and app development.”
TLAE, which took place June 24-27, culminated with a competition to determine the winning project. Team Just Future (top right) took first place on the final day for increasing transparency in government activities and making citizen participation easier to understand. The team included students from Kingsway Community, Pequannock Township High School, Lenape High School, Gloucester County Polytechnic Institute, and Camden County Technical School.
