Transforming Careers through Intellectual Entrepreneurship

“The primary mission of IE ( Intellectual Entrepreneurship) is to educate students to be citizen-scholars—individuals who creatively use their intellectual capital as a lever for social good.”
—Dr. Richard Cherwitz, IE Consortium founder, University of Texas-Austin
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While the following link to this interesting article is a long read, and while at first you might wonder how does this apply to the arts, read it because it completely does. The work of Rick Cherwitz at University of Texas- Austin is ground breaking and applicable regardless of if you are currently in school or have long graduated.
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Exploring All the Options: With help of mentors, students find new paths

Human biology major Justin Jefferson snaps on a pair of bright blue rubber gloves as he prepares to give an informal tour to a recent visitor at a University of Texas at Austin animal behavior research laboratory. The 20-year-old sophomore moves with ease from room to room—one minute inspecting small vials of bloodless brain tissue pulled from a freezer, and the next stroking a large, white rat in his hands—all the while explaining how he helps graduate students and faculty with their research at least 12 hours a week.

“We do many things in our lab, but our main goal is to look at gene expression in rats, and study reproduction and puberty of the rats, mainly at the molecular level,” says Jefferson, who an hour earlier was carefully measuring cellular and molecular changes in brain samples at another lab across campus.

As part of a research study on reproduction in rats, human biology major Justin Jefferson (right) collects cells for graduate student Deena Walker to observe under the microscope at an animal behavior research laboratory on campus. Walker was Jefferson’s mentor last fall when he was enrolled in the IE Pre-Graduate School Internship Program. Photo: Christina Murrey.

Anyone who talks to this confident, young scientist would find it hard to believe that he went to a high school that offered few science classes, or that he felt overwhelmed by his first year at college…