As the lead instigator for three academic programs, the Global Social Impact Fellowship, the Lehigh Valley Social Impact Fellowship, and the Campus Sustainable Impact Fellowship at Lehigh University, and in my previous avatar as the Founding Director of the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) Program at Penn State, I have witnessed firsthand the transformation that occurs in students when they work on challenges they deeply care about and where they believe they can make a real difference in the lives of others. At that point, grades don’t matter, the number of hours spent on a project are not counted, and social life takes a backseat, for the students are laser-focused on the mission of the project. Students find themselves and define themselves when they lose themselves in the quest for building a world that works for everyone. Students truly come alive, realize that engineers can be artists and anthropologists and entrepreneurs at the same time, and accomplish things neither they nor their faculty advisors thought possible.
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