Campus-Corns - The new Summa Cum Laude?

It's strange when an OEM starts to build its own brand of cars. They are just supposed to supply the crucial parts. So why this last-mile and long-tail jump? But then, don't they have the best grip in understanding the car? So why not?

- Pratima H

One young girl from Jaipur looks at road accidents in India and turns to AI for some help. A young boy watches his grandfather struggle with syringes and when diagnosed with Diabetes, decides he would take matters in his own hands, literally.

In a different corridor on a different campus, an engineering student runs into the previous mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel – making him think creatively about an engineering senior design project to bring internet access to remote areas.

There is also someone who started thinking about prosthetics when he was seven years old; and - when he huddled a small group of University of Illinois engineers - turned this dream into a tactile company.

Another young student in the USA wonders why we are putting the PFAS back into landfills or burning it to churn out toxic aerosols into the air; and creates a technology-backed answer. Another student on a global university campus comes up with an affordable test to better determine antibiotic susceptibility for blood-borne pathogens.

Not far away is a Professor who started on a new path after being worried about specially-abled people in cars and explored retrofit seatbelts as a solution.

Can you guess what connects these globally-scattered brains? Yes, they are all about helping humanity. But also, they all started these ventures in a university atmosphere.

They are far apart, in different time zones, in different fields – and, yet, parked in the same Venn diagram intersection. They are bitten by the proverbial ‘entrepreneur’ bug. The bug that makes some people get up, fix things, turn change-makers and start something ‘up’.

Student-turned Entrepreneurs! That’s a story that is still as ripe and as relevant as the Facebook born out of a dorm room.

SLEEPLESS IN START-UPS