Spotlight On session with School of Business and Management professor, Melanie Sodka

Melanie 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 the NC Sustainability Hackathon, an NC Speaker Series, an Entrepreneurial Mentoring and Support Program, and an 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, participants will learn the following:

• The ways in which Melanie supports and assesses her highly applied projects with somewhat unpredictable outcomes, including how she finds and maintains industry partners.
• The growth that she and her students experienced throughout the projects, and highlight lessons learned from challenges that they encountered.
• Participants will also have the chance to ask questions and learn from Melanie’s experiences to help grow the experiential learning and partnerships in their own courses or programs.

The Spotlight On session will be held on January 26 from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

Register for the Spotlight On session here.