By Emily Schoch | Staff Writer
University Innovation Fellows (UIF) is a program hosted by Stanford University, leading cohorts of up to four students per university into leadership and innovation.
Stanford allows students involved in UIF to act as liaison between their university and Stanford in order to come up with points of innovation, which will in turn become projects the cohort of students in the UIF program carry out on their very own campuses.
Austin sophomore Warren Huang said he was looking for new ways to get involved at Baylor through a global perspective.
“I just initially started surfing the web for entrepreneurship programs at other universities that maybe Baylor could take part in, and I just stumbled on UIF and it seemed to be really awesome,” Huang said.
After Huang discovered UIF, he linked up with three other students: Westport, Conn., sophomore Spencer Yim, Littleton, Colo., sophomore Ethan Friend and Lubbock junior Carter Lewis. All four students applied and were accepted to form the first Baylor UIF cohort.
“The reason why I decided to seek this program out in the beginning was because I saw that there was a gap between faculty and students here at Baylor,” Huang said. “We wanted more student involvement in some type of manner.”
Yim said that in addition to bringing entrepreneurship and leadership opportunities to Baylor, UIF also provides a way to work alongside Stanford in a global capacity.
“Innovation Fellows Program is made up of a leadership module that teaches students from across the school about how to interact together in a collaborative environment to pursue excellence in innovation and entrepreneurship and design,” Yim said.
All four members of the UIF cohort were required to go through asynchronous leadership training hosted by the Stanford Institute of Design. After they finished their leadership training sequence, it was time for them to start brainstorming points of innovation that they saw were necessary to address.
“We decided to focus on something that we were all passionate about and felt like we could change and have a significant impact here on campus, and that was food waste,” Huang said. “Penland wastes about 14,000 pounds of food every month, and other places across campus do too.”
After identifying a project for the semester, the cohort held a stakeholder meeting with some of Baylor’s leaders — including Provost Nancy Brickhouse — to share their ideas and hopes of receiving support from Baylor’s side of the equation.
After the stakeholder meeting on Friday, Brickhouse shared her agreement with the UIF team’s mission of combating food waste across campus.
“I can’t imagine a better project actually to take on because it is a fixable problem and it’s an important one, so I’m really excited to see where this is going to go,” Brickhouse said.
Brickhouse saw are several benefits to having a Baylor UIF cohort, and she is excited to see it emerge on campus.
“I think it’s a great opportunity for students to learn how to think in terms of taking on big problems that they can solve. It gives them a nationwide network. … where they provide specific training to make things happen,” Brickhouse said.
The UIF cohort at Baylor University doesn’t stop with these four founding members. UIF is currently taking applicants for next year’s candidates, and applications close in May 2025.
“UIF stands out as a chance for student advocacy and definitely brings a global connection to Baylor,” Friend said. “It really has a holistic approach in trying to solve these problems on campus where we’re really trying to emphasize the student voice.”
