The Idea

The Sherman Center for Entrepreneurship Engineering Education is an institute at Northeastern that has been focused on helping students develop skills in the field of entrepreneurial engineering. Through its main programs, REV,Events, the Sherman Center COOP, the Entrepreneurial Engineering minor, and Generate the Sherman Center provides its community with an interdisciplinary education on how to turn ideas into tangible products.

Generate is the largest of the Sherman Center programs with over 80 members from a range of backgrounds from graphic design and marketing to computer science and engineering. Generate serves as Northeastern’s student lead product development studio providing Northeastern entrepreneurs with the technical expertise needed to develop their products from early stage ideas to tangible products. In the process Generate helps develop the skill set of its Build Studio members by giving them first hand experience leading and/or working on an interdisciplinary team to develop a real product for a client. Beyond the project work Generate’s members get to take advantage of being part of a tight-knit community and people from all backgrounds get to have exposure to new fields of study and ways of thinking.

As a member of Generate for three-and-a-half years I could attest first hand that I learned an immense amount about entrepreneurship and engineering by getting to work in such a close knit community and an interdisciplinary environment. Through my work there and being part of the Generate and broader Sherman Center community I was able to grow as a leader, as an engineer, and as a person. I am not alone in this experience. Nearly everyone who joins the Sherman Center reports coming away from their time as part of the community having learned something new, formed meaningful connections, and developed new skills.

However there was a basic shortcoming to Generate in particular as well as other Sherman Center programs; they require an application to join. Since Generate teams work on products for actual clients, there is a certain amount of experience needed to ensure that we are able to meet our goals on a semester long timeline.

This left the Sherman Center with a blindspot— Freshmen and sophomores who were passionate and talented engineers with a strong entrepreneurial drive that didnt have a home to learn about and develop those skills. In being a part of the entrepreneurial community at Northeastern I got the chance to see first hand through our clients and through events like the Husky Startup Challenge just what some freshmen were capable of.

The original seeds for this idea were long in the works but they especially kicked into gear in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the United State’s racial justice reckoning. During this time, like so many other organizations, the Sherman Center looked internally and saw that, while we were more diverse than the broader engineering school and the field, there was still a lot more to do and a lot more that could be done to include more diverse voices in our community.

So the idea was born for a new kind of Sherman Center program. One that was open to motivated students of all backgrounds, to teach them skills critical to developing innovative and successful products. A program where they could get the same hands-on experience that Generate offers in a space with lower stakes and with more support. An organization built and lead by students to help students.

With that Forge was born. The concept was pitched to the Assistant Director of the Sherman Center in early October 2020. He showed great enthusiasm and guided me through the early stages of setting up a mission statement for Forge and implementing an initial org structure. After getting approval from the Director of the Sherman Center and appointing a management team of talented student leaders, Forge went ahead with a pilot semester in Spring 2021.

How It Works

Forge’s mission is to create a diverse development focused community that teaches entrepreneurial engineering skills to motivated tech minded students. To do this effectively, the organization is separated into 3 teams that work together to provide a supportive and developmental experience for all of its members.

Workshops

Forge is mainly centered around the Workshops team which directly educates Forge members on those entrepreneurial engineering skills. We chose to define entrepreneurial engineering skills in 4 primary groups

1. Entrepreneurship (Identifying and characterizing needs and developing a business case)

2. Product Development (Building and testing human centered products)

3. Leadership (How to build and selfelessly lead a team)

4. Technical skills (3D printing, CAD, PCB design)

To do this the Workshops team puts on a series of engaging and interactive workshops over the course of the semester taught by experienced students. Forge also hosts a speaker series in which industry professionals participate in panel discussions about product development in the “real world” and the challenges they face. Forge workshops and speaker series events are open to everybody and publicly advertised. That said the workshops series and it content is directly connected to the product lab team such that the content covered each week corresponds with the Product Lab stage of development.

Product Lab

For more motivated students looking for a hands on experience there is the Product Lab. Each semester the Product Lab sets a theme centered around a pertinent global need (i.e sustainability, remote work, COVID-19). Students can then apply to be a Project Lead and lead a team in identifying a problem within the theme and developing a proof-of-concept prototype over the course of the semester. Applications to join the teams are short interest forms. The language of the interest form and the intent of the hiring process is not to select the most qualified candidate but the most motivated and eager to learn. As they develop products they are directly supported by the Workshops team and their subject matter experts to conduct design reviews and provide guidance.

Community

Encompassing the Product Lab and Workshops team is the Community team that serves to facilitate and maintain the broader Forge community. The community puts on events, defines and enforces our core values and manages channels of communications between all members of Forge. The community team also serves as Forge’s operations team, responsible for any infrastructure, such as the makerspace, and purchasing of any raw materials by the Product Lab.

Pilot Semester

Official work on Forge kicked off in early November after acceptance into the Sherman Center by leadership. I immediately begun by hiring a management team to help fully realize Forge and each of its sub-teams. After hiring directors for each of the sub-teams, we set to work better defining exactly the scope of the subteams, what responsibilities they had within the org, and their goals for the coming semester. To tackle those goals, each of the directors hired their own teams. The process of establishing the initial back-end goals and infrastructure for the team and the organization to function lasted until early march when we were finally ready to start accepting Product Lab applications for a short 6-week build sprint on the Workshops and Product Lab teams. The Product Lab had decided on a theme of COVID-19 and both project leads took on the challenge of designing N95 mask devices that were safe and sanitary—one for reusable masks to sanitize them after wearing, and a touch free disposable mask dispenser that kept masks unexposed when not in use.

We ended up with a cohort of 20 first and second year students from a variety of backgrounds and fields of study. They were split into 2 teams according to their interests and began moving through the product development process.

In week 1 they tackled problem identification where they characterized the current needs that were not met with existing solutions, and pinpointing how those existing solution (if any) fell short. The following week the teams then moved into a brainstorming phase where they ideated solutions and build lo-fi prototypes out of cardboard and spare legos.

This was followed by a long stint learning about CAD and electronics design as the students designed their products using Fusion360 and Eagle. For many students this was their first exposure to CAD and its capabilities, so having in-sync workshops were a big help to the teams in learning this new skill. The community team also helped product lab teams interface with subject matter experts on the workshops team to troubleshoot software glitches or design inconsistencies.

And in the final 3 weeks of the semester, teams learned about and used rapid prototyping technologies such as 3D printing and Laser cutting to build out their proof of concept prototypes which they presented at a final showcase.

The work done over the course of the semester by all teams was phenomenal. The workshops team was able to conduct incredibly engaging and professional sessions that taught students real technical and entrepreneurial skills. The Product Lab teams put together functional proof of concept prototypes on tight timelines in a virtual environment. And the Community team organized multiple events and carried out operations for the organization smoothly

Launching in a Pandemic

From concept to the end of our final semester Forge was built in the midst of a global pandemic and building the org during this time posed a unique challenge to all members of the organization. As a new organization Forge didn’t have the opportunity to leverage in person advertising through flyers and posters or have the ability to speak in classrooms about who we were. Additionally, as a mostly hardware focused organization, managing resources and access to shared maker spaces while staying within University COVID regulations proved to be a daunting challenge, not made easier by some members of the team being 3 timezones away. Most significantly however Forge had to contend with a class of students experiencing burnout and fatigue from a semester sat in zoom classes for hours on end and experiencing social isolation.

However through the team’s ingenuity, perseverance, and motivation we were able to overcome these. We leveraged contacts from other larger student organizations within and outside of the Sherman Center to help promote Forge on their social media. We worked closely with the Sherman Center and the university to negotiate for the space access while doing much of the design and prototyping work remotely to maximize our available time. Finally, the community team really shined by providing game nights and virtual social events to allow students to meet and build a sense of camaraderie and shared community.