As a professor in the School of Business and Management, Melanie Sodka has worked to expand entrepreneurial experiential learning for NC students through a variety of strategies and initiatives. Melanie’s work on the NC $5 Challenge, where students were to create a venture with only $5 in seed money, earned her and colleague Cammie Jaquays the President’s Award for Innovation in Student Learning and Success in 2021/2022. Other projects that Melanie has helped create include a NC Sustainability Hackathon, a NC Speaker Series, an Entrepreneurial Mentoring and Support Program, and a NC Entrepreneurship Marketplace.

Many of Melanie’s experiential activities share common characteristics, including flexibility, creativity, industry involvement and student-driven decision making. During this Spotlight On Session, we will hear from Melanie about the ways in which she supports and assesses these highly applied projects with somewhat unpredictable outcomes, including how she finds and maintains industry partners. She will discuss the growth that she and her students experienced throughout the projects, and highlight lessons learned from challenges that they encountered. We will then open the discussion to all those in attendance for questions and conversation to learn from Melanie’s experiences to help grow the experiential learning and partnerships in your own courses or programs.