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Pine Crest Upper School Entrepreneurship Seniors Visit Invenergy and Polsky Centers
April 20th 2023
Seniors in Pine Crest’s three-year social entrepreneurship program traveled to Chicago recently for a two-day exploration into businesses and programs focused on renewable energy, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
The students’ first stop was the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Students participated in an information session with members of the Polsky Exchange, a dedicated team with technical expertise focusing on enabling technology commercialization. The faculty panel stressed the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset and challenged students to an engineering design competition. Faculty encouraged students to pursue their own entrepreneurial endeavors or careers in private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurship through acquisition, and/or social entrepreneurship.
While at the Polsky Center, students toured the Fab Lab, where entrepreneurs create prototypes and translate ideas into physical objects using state-of-the-art equipment.
Next, students visited the Invenergy headquarters, a global developer and operator of sustainable energy solutions. Discussions centered around the question, "How do we design for the future right now?" and featured electrical, wind, solar, thermal, power, and transmission storage engineers who spoke about the future of sustainable energy. Students learned about the planning, design, and building of energy projects, followed by a tour of the Invenergy Control Center.
“As a culmination of the three-year program, seniors pick a travel destination anywhere in the country that showcases the entrepreneurial spirit and innovative solutions to complex societal challenges,” said Mrs. Keri Kolettis, Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “In Chicago, the students were able to see theory put into practice. The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation team showed students how to apply world-class business expertise to bring new ideas and breakthrough innovations to the market.”
Reflecting on her time at the Polsky Center, Madison Huang ’23 said “My greatest takeaway was that there are unlimited possibilities for entrepreneurship to enhance a community. The day before we toured the Polsky Center, we toured Chicago and ended up in a cafe called Foxtrot, which also sold products created by local businesses. We found out during the tour that Foxtrot actually works with the Polsky Center to continue expanding and will be coming to a location in Florida soon!”
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