VILLAGE INNOVATORS ANDREW AMIS ’14
director of RCEL last summer. “The idea is to give them experiences as well as teaching and classes — the soft skills that engineers sometimes lack,” Karwowski said. “They’re smart, but they’re not effective, because they don’t have these additional skills.” Students seem to be responding to this new focus on entrepreneurship. Last year, for example, students founded Rice Launch, which merged three smaller groups to “connect, energize and enable” both undergraduates and grad students interested in starting a business. In 2012, the Rice Alliance launched a new graduate business plan competition called the Owl Open. The winner of the Owl Open wins a spot to represent Rice University and compete against other universities in the annual Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC), which boasts $1.5 million in prizes and is billed as “the world’s richest and largest” of its kind. The Princeton Review recently ranked the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business the fourth-best graduate business school in the country for entrepreneurship. And according to Burke, Rice created more startup businesses over 10 years per dollar of research funding than Stanford, Harvard or MIT. A key tenet of this movement is that entrepreneurship isn’t just for business students. According to Rice Provost George McLendon, it’s an increasingly necessary skill in today’s job market regardless of major. “Many, many people involved in the 21st-century economy — some studies say more than 50 percent — will spend some part of their
time working as an independent agent, rather than working for a large corporation,” McLendon said. “Many of our own smartest and most driven students are passionate about creating their own contributions to the world through their own entrepreneurial activities rather than in a more traditional job format.”
profit company that participated in the inaugural OwlSpark program. The company was created to teach students how to build machines like wind turbines, zeroelectricity refrigerators, water purifiers and other technologies that would then help improve life in remote villages around the world. Amis spent the summer after
LECTURING ABOUT LEADERSHIP AND READING ABOUT LEADERSHIP, THOSE ARE ABSOLUTELY GOOD THINGS TO DO, AND RICE WAS DOING THAT. BUT… IF YOU WANT TO BE A LEADER, YOU’VE GOT TO FIRST BE A FOLLOWER AND BE ON A TEAM. NED THOMAS
M
VENTURE VARIETY CLENDON could have been referring to Andrew Amis ’14, a senior double majoring in chemical engineering and history. Amis, along with Ernest Chan ’15 and Lynn Gai ’15, founded Village Innovators, the only non-
his freshman year teaching and traveling in Tanzania. In African school rooms, he would lead his students through simple science experiments using inexpensive equipment such as plastic water bottles instead of beakers. The students enjoyed the experiments so much that Amis wanted to come W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 | R i c e M a g a z ine 37