Written by Cristina Cismas Florea
March 26, 2023
The School of Engineering is proud to offer a new interdisciplinary course for undergraduates that bridges engineering with three SCU centers: Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education, Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, and Ciocca Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The 24 students in the course are from a variety of SCU disciplines, including everything from Biology to Finance to Mechanical Engineering.
The new course in the School of Engineering is ENGR 169 - Innovation in Social Entrepreneurship and Social Justice, and it combines the philosophies of the aforementioned centers, connecting students with non-profits and marginalized communities for the purpose of empathizing with their pain points to generate human-centered design solutions for social justice and social entrepreneurship. As part of ENGR 169, Ciocca Center will be contributing a special edition of our Idea Lab program to the course, a popular program at SCU which exposes students to Design Thinking methodology. Our Spring Quarter offering had 50 registrants. Empathy is a crucial step in the Design Thinking process. Any Design Thinking process that begins without empathy is sure to create a solution that does not impact its stakeholders and likely will not be adopted by them.
ENGR 169 satisfies the SCU ELSJ core curriculum requirement (Experiential Learning for Social Justice) which is currently fulfilled by classes that enable students to partner with communities and organizations in need. What distinguishes ENGR 169 from other ELSJ courses is the fact that the class empowers students to devise a tangible project that they can leave behind with the organization for lasting impact.
Innovation and entrepreneurship in today's society is heavily skewed towards projects and initiatives targeting richer demographics that fit with profit-forward priorities, like those that we see at large companies or corporations. To better align these efforts with SCU’s Jesuit values of service, awareness, and empathy, ENGR 169 teaches students that design thinking is actually at the core of social justice, as some of the toughest problems to innovate for are those found in areas where resources are limited but challenges like discrimination and marginalization abound.
ENGR 169 will encourage students to creatively leverage the skills learned throughout their time at SCU to craft meaningful and practical solutions for their 'customer'. The students will perform the typical tasks of a product development process from identifying user needs, prototyping solutions for those needs, testing out the solutions with their users, and converging on a final recommendation for their organization or community.
Cristina Cismas Florea '07, Cristina has almost 20 years of experience in the education field and has worked with schools, ranging from elementary school to universities, around the world. Cristina founded the BEAM Program (Business, Entrepreneurship, and Math), an international educational program for high schools where students learn how math applies to real-life business scenarios through curriculum developed in partnership with leading firms, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst&Young, then have the opportunity to apply for internships at companies in the BEAM network. BEAM has over 5,000 alumni and has been featured in numerous press articles, including the Nuffic Report in the Netherlands, where it was named one of the best practices in education. Cristina is featured as a Notable Alumni at Santa Clara University for her work with the BEAM Program.