Madeleine Bardy:
Hi. I’m Madeleine Bardy and I’m currently a junior studying aerospace engineering at Cal. One of the most important lessons that I have learned at Berkeley is to appreciate how unique and valuable the opportunities outside of the classroom are and to make the most of them. This includes clubs, professional societies, labs, and the alumni and professional network that we are frequently given the opportunity to interface with.
Personally, I’m heavily involved in Space Enterprise at Berkeley or SEB, which is one of the leading collegiate rocketry teams in the world. The engineering skills that I have learned through the club are unparalleled by any of my other educational experiences. Clubs and societies here at Cal also offer invaluable leadership opportunities, which are often much rarer to come by than technical training. Being able to serve as the manufacturing lead of SEB as well as the academic research liaison for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics here at Berkeley has developed my leadership skills in a unique environment that very few institutions can offer. Best of luck, and go Bears.
Laura Vogt:
Thank you, Madeleine, for sharing your experiences with opportunities outside of the classroom. I’m so glad that you found ways to expand your educational experience and grow within your major. Hello to everyone listening to this week’s The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host, Laura Vogt, associate director of marketing and communications in the College of Engineering. I know some incoming students, first year and transfers, have so many ideas about how to make our planet better, and I’m excited to introduce the Big Ideas Contest at UC Berkeley, a program that provides training, networks, recognition, and funding to interdisciplinary teams of UC Berkeley students who have solutions to real world problems.
I’ve helped to spread the word in my marketing roles in the college, however I have never learned all the ins and outs of the contest so this week I’m excited to have Phillip Denny, the director of Big Ideas at Berkeley, and Ashmita Kumar, an EECS Rising Senior and the 2024 Big Ideas grand prize winner. Phillip, you’re first. Thank you so much for being here today to share about Big Ideas.
Phillip Denny:
Thank you, Laura. Thanks for having me and letting me share a little bit about Big Ideas.
Laura Vogt:
I’m so excited to have you on the podcast for the first time. We haven’t gone… Like I was saying, that we haven’t gone into a deep dive for it, so I’m excited to learn more about it, but let’s start off with you. Can you tell us more about your role at UC Berkeley?
Phillip Denny:
Sure. I started as a senior program director for the Blum Center for Developing Economies back in 2006, I believe. It was a long time ago. I’m the senior program director for the Blum Center. I’m also director of the Big Ideas at Berkeley program. Just a little bit of background on the Blum Center, the mission of the Blum Center is to leverage the talent, the enthusiasm, the energy of the UC Berkeley community to solve some of these really grand challenges of global poverty. We have an interdisciplinary approach, we have an education program, a research program, and we also support innovative initiatives aimed at supporting or promoting social justice, inclusiveness, greater economic and social mobility for all. It’s really within that last pillar, the innovative initiatives, where Big Ideas falls in. Big Ideas is a early stage social innovation ecosystem that provides funding, support, mentorship, networks, and seed funding to interdisciplinary teams of students who have creative solutions to pressing social challenges.
Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for being here today and telling us more about this. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of Big Ideas? Where did the idea come from and how long has it been around?
Phillip Denny:
Yeah, I can. I will start first with some high-level stats. Since 2006… Actually 2008 when the Blum Center began managing this program. It was launched in 2006. Since that time, we’ve supported more than 10,000 student innovators, more than 3500 social venture ideas over that period. There’s been about 550 winners of the competition, so we have more than one winner. We typically have anywhere between 20 to 30 winners per year, and they’re now working in 50 countries across the globe on issues such as safe water and sanitation services, climate change mitigation, workforce development and training, eliminating food insecurity, and so many more issues. We’ve awarded about $3 million, Big Ideas has, over that time, over the last 18 years.
What’s been incredible to see is that those teams that have won awards have gone on to leverage an additional 1.3 billion, billion with a B, an additional financing through venture capital, foundations, government grants, philanthropy, et cetera. 50% of the teams annually now are led by women, and last year more than 75 different majors participated in Big Ideas, both graduate and undergraduate students.
Laura Vogt:
That is so amazing. I didn’t realize that it, one, had been around for so long, but, two, that it provides so much of that startup money and the networking that you’re going to need to be successful in something like this.
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. That’s the goal of the program is to take students who have early stage ideas and potential solutions to those challenges that they’re seeing and helping them through an academic year-long program to translate those ideas into viable, sustainable social ventures.
Laura Vogt:
Tell me a little bit more about the year-long program. What are the components of this contest?
Phillip Denny:
There’s two stages to Big Ideas. There’s the pre-proposal application in the fall semester where students submit a three-page concept note that goes over the problem they’ve identified, the landscape analysis of other solutions that have been attempted in the space, and then it describes sort of how their solution is filling the gap or the opportunity that they’ve identified to solve that pressing social challenge. Then there’s a second stage where we move about 20 of the teams onto, and in that stage we really focus on helping the teams develop an implementation strategy that outlines every step they need to take over the course of the next year to get this project off the ground. That’s an eight to nine-page implementation strategy, and they work with an assigned mentor that we pair them with to help them develop that plan.
Laura Vogt:
I imagine that even if you’re not in the 20% of people that move on to the second part, you give feedback and things to the people that don’t make it through.
Phillip Denny:
That was one of the key takeaways when we began managing this program back in 2008. We did a really robust analysis of how we could add support and services to students, those who make it to the final round as well as those who don’t, and so we have a really robust review process where each application is read by six to eight judges in the first round and all of that feedback goes back to the teams, but we also have a consulting program where any student can come to me, come to our staff, and through advising we pair them with consultants, with mentors who can help them address whatever need they have with their project.
Over the course of the 20 years of Big Ideas, we have more than 2000 volunteer industry mentors and judges, and those people, a lot are Cal alumni, and they just are willing to give back their time and their energy to support the next generation of changemakers. I think one of the biggest assets we have is our judge and mentor network and being able to lean into that for the teams that are applying.
Laura Vogt:
That was going to be part of my question is who are the folks that students are working with throughout the year? So there’s the staff on campus plus your volunteers.
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. There’s our staff, the Big Ideas and the Blum Center team, but we also have… This past year I was just doing our Salesforce update, and we had over 200 judges and mentors participate in the contest last year, the 2023-2024 academic year, and they come from all areas of industry. In Big Ideas, we have multiple different tracks. We have global health and financial inclusion, art and social change, food and agriculture, energy and resources.
Our industry mentors and judges hail from all of those various industries with a wealth of experience and, again, they’re always willing to give back their time to UC Berkeley students. So we have those, and then the other asset, the other sort of network that students get from Big Ideas is being around other creative, innovative, socially-minded students. We have team building and networking events where students can find team members where they can think through their ideas. At every workshop and skill development session that we hold for Big Ideas, we have opportunities to sort of break out into groups and meet other students. It’s really become a really rich network for social innovators on the Berkeley campus.
Laura Vogt:
I know it’s not something that you can just say, “Hey, I’m going to do this and the deadline is tomorrow.” Where should students start thinking about the projects and applying and pulling things together?
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. The beauty of Big Ideas is that we are really the earliest of early stage innovation programs. All students need to have when they enter Big Ideas when the program launches in September is a problem that they’ve identified, something that they’re passionate about, something that they care about, and then a rough formula or idea or framework or solution to that problem. Then we have skill development workshops over the course of the fall semester to help students develop those ideas and to create that three-page concept note that is due on November 20th.
Laura Vogt:
Where should students start if they just want to know more about the contest?
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. We have a website. It’s bigideascontest.org. That’s the first place. I would also definitely recommend reaching out to me and to our team. You can schedule a one-on-one advising session, either a 15-minute session if you just want to talk through the idea or a 30-minute session if you have an idea and you want to sort of deep dive in deeper to your proposal. You can access our advising calendar at bigideascontest.org/advising. You can also… I think the first step a lot of students take is they come to an information session. We’ll be holding information sessions across the fall. The first one is on September 20th in Blum Hall, but we’re also going to hybrid Zoom it as well. Then the last thing is just to email me, bigideas@berkeley.edu is the easiest one to remember, bigideas@berkeley.edu. Just email me questions over email and I will respond quickly to those.
Laura Vogt:
Excellent. I’m going to have all these links on our podcast page so that folks can find it easy if they are having trouble being able to type it down or want to be able to find it easily. Always go back to the ESS Podcast on the engineering website if you need to find links. Who is eligible to participate?
Phillip Denny:
Big Ideas is open to any matriculated full-time student on the UC Berkeley campus. That includes undergrads, master’s students or PhD students. As long as you’re registered in the fall semester next year or I guess fall 2024. I’m already calling it next year but I guess it’s this year. As long as you’re matriculated then, you’re eligible to apply.
Laura Vogt:
What does the time commitment look like?
Phillip Denny:
Big Ideas was intentionally designed to be co-curricular. We want to meet students where they are, and we know that students have competing demands on their time, they have social lives and academic lives and personal lives. In order to compete in Big Ideas, there are two main deadlines. There is the pre-proposal deadline on November 20th, and then if you are selected for the final round there’s a full proposal deadline on April 4th of 2025. All of the skill development sessions, all of the events, all of our resources are sort of opt-in. If you find value in them, if you have the time, we want you to take advantage of those, and we do find that the teams that take advantage of these tend to do a little bit better because they have the scaffolding there to support them, but really it is opt-in.
Laura Vogt:
Do you know of any courses that students could take at Berkeley that would help support them in this endeavor?
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. There’s a lot of great courses that are run through two programs, the Sutardja Center. The Sutardja Center has their Collider Cup courses, which are awesome, they have a social entrepreneurship course, they have a course around deplastifying the planet. All of these projects, all of these courses take students in, pair them on projects, and they come up with sort of solutions, and we see a lot of Big Ideas sort of originate from SCET courses. The other great program is Berkeley Changemakers, and they have similar style courses where students are learning about social problems and how they can use their energy and their talents to make a difference.
Laura Vogt:
Is there an amount of time that you think somebody should be at Berkeley before they try to do the contest or…
Phillip Denny:
Interestingly, no. It really comes down to sort the student and their idea and their sort of ability and passion to follow through. That’s I think the key. We’ve had students who have won Big Ideas as freshmen, we’ve had students who have won Big Ideas as a fifth or sixth year PhD student, and everywhere in between.
Laura Vogt:
Do you still provide support after the fact if somebody’s won and they still maybe need a little help getting to the next level or…
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. One of the great things having been on the Berkeley campus now for 18 years and one of the first innovation ecosystem programs on the Berkeley campus, we’ve seen this tremendous growth in programming around entrepreneurship and innovation at UC Berkeley. We have great partnerships and collaborations with all of the various programs and all of the leading accelerators and incubators on campus such as CITRIS Foundry, SkyDeck, NSF I-Corps, et cetera. We help our students find those pathways, which is most appropriate for them and their project. We are always helping them navigate the UC Berkeley entrepreneurship ecosystem upon sort of winning Big Ideas or even participating in Big Ideas, and then we always are a resource, helping them tap into networks that they need additional support in. Again, through that Big Ideas judge and mentor network of 2000 individuals we always are helping them reach out and make those connections, do the customer discovery and the interviews they need to do to sort of inform their ideas.
Laura Vogt:
If students are thinking about doing this, do you work with a lot of single students or pairs or groups or have you found one that seems to be more successful than others?
Phillip Denny:
No. Big ideas I always say come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it can be one student working on a project, other times it can be an entire student club at UC Berkeley working on a project. We’ve had projects as big as 60, we’ve had projects as small as one. What really it comes down to is do they have the people in the roles covered on the project? Do they have all the adequate sort of skills that they need to implement the project? That’s one of the things we look for in the final round application is have you thought through all of the roles and skills that you need to have on the project to implement it if we give you funding? We want to see that they thought through that issue. But, for instance, we’ve had projects that were documentary films that one student could produce on their own that were increasing awareness about a potential social issue. We’ve had larger innovations, again, that have been large student teams.
Laura Vogt:
What’s your favorite part of working with students and their big ideas?
Phillip Denny:
That’s a really tough question. I mean, every year I’m really amazed by the passion, the commitment of UC Berkeley students who are dedicating their time, their wisdom to try and make the world a better and more just place. We are at UC Berkeley. It’s the top public university in the world, it’s renowned for its global and social engagement, and our students have this really long and deep history of involvement in addressing social issues and global issues already.
At Big Ideas, we get to work with the ones that are really following through and committing their time and energy to climate change mitigation again and public health issues and technology innovation. They’re trying to make those contributions across both local, domestic, and international communities. That’s one of the most rewarding things. For me personally, I have the opportunity to play a very small part in helping these students catalyze their really game-changing social ventures and support them as they grow and I get to watch them as they grow and make an impact in the real world as they sort of scale out of UC Berkeley and have real world impact, so that’s immensely rewarding. It’s gratifying. It’s constantly uplifting and reinvigorating and keeping me working hard because I see how hard the students themselves are working.
Laura Vogt:
I think it’s interesting that you said you worked with a student that was doing a documentary, and then I know that Ashmita who we’re going to talk to later this episode did a app about stroke technology. It seems like you have a pretty wide gambit of what an idea can be. It’s not like you have to have… You don’t have to have a physical object or you don’t have to have… It doesn’t have to be an app. It could be just so many different things.
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. Again, big ideas, all shapes and sizes. They can be any type of sort of organizational structure. They can be for-profit, non-profit, hybrid. They can be technologies, hardware, software, but they don’t have to be. They can be service programs, they can be theater, they can be non-technology-based innovations as long as they fill three main criteria for Big Ideas. That is they are early stage, they are student-led, and they have an emphasis on social impact or an emphasis on sort of bettering the lives of people, communities or the planet.
Laura Vogt:
Can you share with me maybe two or three of some of your favorite projects that still stand out to you?
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. Since this is an engineering podcast, I’ll go with some that focus more on engineering. There was one project, and this project came through Big Ideas in 2014. It was called Ava. The student was getting his master’s in engineering at UC Berkeley, and he had grown up in a family where he was the only hearing individual. His mother, his father, and his sibling were all deaf, and so he came to Berkeley kind of on a mission. He wanted to create a platform that could help hard of hearing individuals follow group conversations because his lived experience was having to answer the phone for his parents and having to interpret conversations. In a group conversation when the conversation is switching back and forth between people, it’s very hard for a person who is hard of hearing to follow that conversation.
Long story short, he paired with a couple of other UC Berkeley students. They created Ava, which is a speech-to-text application program that helps hard of hearing individuals follow group conversations. This has now raised $16 million to date. It got series A funding last year mainly through Coastal Ventures, which is a big venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Its valuation is I think around 37 billion right now. It’s launched in France, it’s launched in the US, and it’s really making a difference already, so that’s one. You got to stop me because I can go on and on and on. When I start talking about stories and students, I can go on for days.
But one of the other favorite projects… One of my favorite innovators of all time that came through UC Berkeley was Paige Balcom, and she got both her master’s and her PhD in engineering here at UC Berkeley. She created Takataka Plastics, and this was a project that came about because she went to Northern Uganda, really rural part of Uganda, as a student on a field trip and she saw how much plastic waste was accumulating in this one area of Northern Uganda. It’s sort of where all the PET plastics end up in East Africa. She was sort of traumatized by this, she wanted to do something, and so when she came to Berkeley to get her engineering degree she started investigating how she could sort of melt the PET plastics and transform those into building materials, tiles and chairs and things like that.
Fast-forward again to today, she’s launched Takataka Plastics and it’s locally recycling plastic waste into quality, affordable construction materials. It also creates jobs for the at youth risks in this town in Northern Uganda, and it now has 66 full-time employees, 26 of whom are vulnerable youth, they’ve educated over 1000 students from schools across Uganda, and they just recently got a $1 million grant for a permanent home that will position them to be the largest PET plastics recycler in East Africa, and so again, making a huge difference in that region.
Laura Vogt:
That’s awesome. What do you think is the best way for students to keep up-to-date with Big Ideas?
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. Go back to the website, which is bigideascontest.org, check in with me, bigideascontest.org/advising, you can sign up on my calendar for a meeting with me one-on-one, either 15 minutes or 30 minutes, come to our fall information session, first one is September 20th, or just email me again at bigideas@berkeley.edu.
Laura Vogt:
Like I said earlier, in my marketing efforts for the College of Engineering we definitely put this in newsletters and on our social channels and try to share out as much as we can about it because I knew it was just an awesome program and so excited to be learning more about it because it just sounds even better than I thought it was. Is there anything that you want to add that we haven’t covered today?
Phillip Denny:
Again, since this is an engineering podcast I guess I would just emphasize how much success engineering students have had in Big Ideas over the years. It’s one of the largest sort of pool of students from colleges and departments across campus. I think last year we had 88 engineering students who participated on winning projects in Big Ideas, so 88 Berkeley engineering students and that’s graduate and undergraduate, then 10 of the 15 winning projects in Big Ideas last year were UC Berkeley engineering students. We had 15 winning projects winning up to $20,000 last year, and across those 10 of them had engineering students so there’s a really rich history and tradition for engineering students to carry on, and we hope to see many of them participating in Big Ideas next year.
Laura Vogt:
I’m so excited to find out that participating in Big Ideas, even if you don’t end up going all the way and becoming one of the winning projects, you’ve gotten a ton of training and support even up to the first half point of being able to build this idea.
Phillip Denny:
Yeah. I always say there is no better time than when you’re a college student to try and do something like this, to try and take on a big idea because to take on a big idea, to create a social venture, it takes a multidisciplinary breadth of expertise, and nowhere but a university do you have students from engineering, business, social sciences or College of Natural Resources and the Environment, School of Public Policy. You can find a great team to launch and develop a project here at UC Berkeley, and it’s a great place to do it plus you have access to so many different resources on campus or the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, the faculty, and just the alumni that want to support UC Berkeley students.
Laura Vogt:
That’s so cool. I really like the idea that it’s called Big Ideas because you do, you have this huge idea and you’re like, “Okay, well, what do I do from here?” And that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to help them know how to drill it down to be able to make that happen, so that is just awesome.
Phillip Denny:
Yeah, we’ll… Yeah, we’ll get you started and then we’ll help you identify the pathways to help you scale that idea you have.
Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much, Phillip, for being here today and telling us all about Big Ideas and how the students can participate.
Phillip Denny:
I really appreciate it, Laura. Thanks for having me.
Laura Vogt:
Next up, we’re going to be talking to Ashmita. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here today to tell us about your experience with the Big Ideas, and congratulations on winning this last year and all the work that you did.
Ashmita Kumar:
Hi. Thank you so much.
Laura Vogt:
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your major [inaudible 00:24:33], things you’ve been involved in at Berkeley Engineering?
Ashmita Kumar:
Yeah. I’m a third year EECS major here at Berkeley, involved in machine learning at Berkeley, the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, and most recently I’ve been a part of Big Ideas, StEP, and AI Entrepreneurs at Berkeley’s latest cohorts. My favorite part of being a Berkeley engineering student is the opportunity to meet such amazing people. People come from all walks of life, but the one thing that they have in common is a drive to create powerful change through the engineering that they study, nowhere more so than Big Ideas and other entrepreneurship orgs on campus. To be a part of this community makes you better too.
Laura Vogt:
I’m excited that you also were part of SCET because a little later in the summer, we’re having a podcast all about their fellowship and some of the classes that they’re teaching too.
Ashmita Kumar:
Yeah, no, I highly recommend it for any incoming Berkeley student. Yeah.
Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you again for being here. Let’s talk first about the project that you used that won your competition this year. Let’s hear a little bit about that.
Ashmita Kumar:
Yeah. Code Blue is the name of the project. It’s a device plugin that detects the first signs of stroke. We call and text the user’s emergency contact on the onset of symptoms to prevent long-term damage and death.
Laura Vogt:
Was your concept something that you’d been working on or did it start as an idea because you saw the competition or…
Ashmita Kumar:
It was something that we had been working on May of the previous year. Code Blue was actually inspired by my personal family history of stroke and a main reason that I wanted to get into technology in the first place. Big Ideas ended up being the perfect platform for me to actually get the chance to develop it out further.
Laura Vogt:
Were you on a team by yourself or did you have anyone that you worked with?
Ashmita Kumar:
I actually had my friend that I met at a hackathon. Their name is Erica. They’re actually a PhD student now at University of Denver, so yeah.
Laura Vogt:
That is great. I’m going to introduce a special guest of the podcast today, which is my 10-year-old nephew, Cameron, to ask one of our questions.
Cameron:
Hello.
Ashmita Kumar:
Hey, Cameron. Nice to meet you.
Cameron:
You too.
Laura Vogt:
[inaudible 00:26:44].
Cameron:
How much time did you spend on the development and participation in Big Ideas?
Ashmita Kumar:
Okay, so I actually spent a ton of time. The Big Ideas pre-proposal was due in December, so we spent from August to December developing out Code Blue. We were doing customer discovery interviews, we were meeting new people, we were forming partnerships with UCSF, Stroke Center. We were doing a lot of that. Then December we submitted. In January, we got the news that we got to be one of the finalists, and from then on in addition to workshops and weekly meetings that we were doing, we were also developing our own proposal out on the side, building out the technology some more, we were figuring out how to budget, meeting weekly with our mentors provided by Big Ideas, and all of these different things.
Laura Vogt:
It sounds like… How did you do that as well as your classes and maybe other orgs that you’re a part of?
Ashmita Kumar:
Good question. It is hard. It’s a lot of juggling, especially because Big Ideas is a perfect way to start building out things that you’re very passionate about even in the spirit of entrepreneurship, but it will take a lot of time because it’s a company kind of thing that you’re building out. The way I balanced it is I had to decide what my priorities were. I ranked them. I decided this is what I was willing to accept in terms of grades from my classes as opposed to how much I really wanted to work on this idea, and then I struck a balance and I made sure I devoted X many hours a day to Big Ideas and the rest of the day toward school and my other orgs.
Laura Vogt:
So it was a lot of planning.
Ashmita Kumar:
Oh yeah. Lots of planning.
Laura Vogt:
Did you take any classes at Berkeley that specifically helped you with your idea or to support you with the Big Ideas Contest?
Ashmita Kumar:
Oh yeah. There were tons of really great classes that I took. I would say the SCET classes were very valuable. There was one that I took called Technology Entrepreneurship, very intense class, but the idea is to take your idea and build it all the way out, all the way to the stage of pitching to investors, so you learn all of the ins and outs of what it’s like to be a first time entrepreneur from making your evaluation and cap table and real world pitching to investors and all of these things. Other really good classes, there was a class on patent law for entrepreneurs that I did take during last semester and then there were also comp sci classes that helped me a lot.
For example, I took the operating systems class 162, which feels like it has nothing to do with the AI technology that I was creating, but what it did teach me was how you work on a team and how you develop things together but asynchronously, how you split work, how to do all of these co-development things that are going to be a big part of your coding journey later on.
Laura Vogt:
Did you take them before you started doing Big Ideas or was this something that you kind of did at the same time?
Ashmita Kumar:
I took some of them before but most of them at the same time. It was amazing how you could see the parallels between both, especially as you drove towards Big Ideas and the workshops that reiterated how to create the same things, and it really, really helped to do both at the same time.
Laura Vogt:
Now that you have this whole program in place and you’ve won the award through Big Ideas, what are your plans in the future for Code Blue and are you working with anyone else to continue testing the program?
Ashmita Kumar:
Oh yeah. Our plans for Code Blue, by March when we were doing the Big Ideas finals we decided to incorporate this. Code Blue is now a company that we’re starting up right outside of school, and our goal is to basically get it so that it’s on everybody’s devices so that stroke detection is a technology that’s democratized, so that your access to it doesn’t depend on your socioeconomic status or any of these other barriers that prevent access to health technology.
Right now, using the funds that we got from Big Ideas we’re converting our provisional patent into a utility patent for our technology and we’re going to be starting our clinical studies with UCSF students to actually vet our true false positive rates and false negative rates, collect more data, and improve the technology. The goal is we’ll continue to do these clinical studies with some of the funding that we’ve raised, and eventually in February hopefully apply for our FDA clearance and start getting Code Blue out there.
Laura Vogt:
Oh, that is amazing. That is so cool. I like the idea of having it so that it’s just something that comes with the technology that you’re already using every day, that it could be this easily accessible thing.
Ashmita Kumar:
Exactly. That’s the vision. Code Blue was inspired by my family history. I have a family history of stroke, but members of my family did not recognize the signs, did not go to the hospital. They’re not unique. Actually, over 60% of people cannot identify the major signs of stroke according to the CDC, and with one in four people worldwide expected to have a stroke in their lifetimes this really becomes a technology where I can see it can impact billions of people and change their lives for the better, and that’s really my goal.
Laura Vogt:
That is amazing. If you could go and do something different in the process, is there something that you would’ve done differently?
Ashmita Kumar:
I would’ve applied for Big Ideas sooner. I did not realize… I had heard of it in my first year on campus, but when I actually got into it, this is where I met so many founders who are just like me. If you’re lucky enough to talk to some of the Big Ideas finalists, they’re off doing amazing things. They’ve all created companies that are focused on not only being a successful company, but more so creating a positive impact, creating positive change through the power of engineering, through the power of technology. I’m incredibly lucky to have met them.
I’m also incredibly lucky to have met Phillip and Karenna who helped run the program this year. They really helped me drive this forward, helped me advance our technology, helped me see what our next steps could be, and helped me practice my pitches and learn how to talk about this. I mean, I owe so much of what happened to Big Ideas, and it was also my gateway into the entrepreneurship community at Berkeley, specifically the technology entrepreneurship community. If I had only done this sooner, it would’ve been even easier a year before to do it.
Laura Vogt:
So you don’t think it’s too early to start talking to the incoming freshmen or the new transfer students about the program and coming up with ideas of what they thought they wanted to do?
Ashmita Kumar:
Absolutely not. The reason why I say that is when you come to Berkeley, you’re probably a lot like how I was when I came to Berkeley. I had thought of this idea. I thought it was amazing. I did it in a hackathon a while back and I was like, “This is why I want to be an engineer. I want to develop things that I can use to help people.” I know I’m not the only one. I’ve actually met some freshmen who are finalists in Big Ideas who’ve done really amazing work, and it’s not too early because it helps you define your ethos. It also helps you set your path in school, the classes that you take, the organizations you become a part of. These are all things that you can start to think about when you get into your first year.
Considering that the application for Big Ideas is in December, it gives you plenty of time to form a team, get to know the people, attend all of these workshops that they set up even not for finalists, but even way before that, and kind of learn not only the technology skills that you need, but also ways to communicate, how to create an idea from scratch and then how to make a plan to build it out, how to budget, how to timeline, how to do all of these things that will be so valuable regardless of whether you start up or not.
Laura Vogt:
If someone wants to connect with you, is there a way that they could do that?
Ashmita Kumar:
Oh, yes. Please. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also email me. My email is ashmita.kumar@berkeley.edu. It’s literally my first name dot last name.
Laura Vogt:
Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you wanted to cover today?
Ashmita Kumar:
I think just the one last thing that is a takeaway, I didn’t actually expect to be starting up straight out of college. I don’t think many people do. What I want everyone to know is your plans are always going to be flexible when you come into Berkeley. The crazy thing about Berkeley is the sheer number of opportunities. You’re in the middle of Silicon Valley, you’re in the middle of a nexus of students who are doing crazy, incredible, amazing things, advancing the fields of research, creating new inventions, trying to start up, so many things. Just don’t limit yourself. Make sure you explore it all because it’s truly an amazing experience once you get to do that.
Laura Vogt:
That’s awesome. I’m so excited to hear about what you did and how you… Just your excitement is just palpable. You could see how this experience was meaningful to you and what you got out of it and what you’re going to continue to get out of it.
Ashmita Kumar:
Yeah, no, not to sound trite but it was transformative. It really was.
Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Ashmita Kumar:
Thank you for having me.
Laura Vogt:
Thank you, Cameron, for being here as one of our guests.
Cameron:
You’re welcome.
Ashmita Kumar:
It was such a pleasure to talk to you, Laura and Cameron.
Laura Vogt:
Please be sure to visit the bigideascontest.org to learn more about the contest and how you can participate. Thank you to everyone for tuning in to The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. We’ll be back next week with more information and resources for your time at Berkeley Engineering.
