Tsai CITY - hidden gem

September 19, 2018 - 11:57am by Anonymous (not verified)

At a powerhouse university like Yale, where it can seem like there is an office for every idea, sometimes the best way to figure out where you might like to be involved is to walk around campus, literally looking for signs. If you’ve done this, one of the most intriguing signs you might have come across is tucked quietly in a little nook of Elm Street, pointing above the glittering Shops of Yale, advertising the offices of the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking (CITY).

The boldly named group is an engine of entrepreneurial activity for interdisciplinarians that regularly attracts a crowd of divinity students to its array of exciting projects. But what is it and how can you get involved?

Like the Divinity School, CITY prides itself on catering to creative thinkers of diverse studies and stripes. Grown out of an intent to advance the university-wide goal of fostering innovative leaders for every facet of society, CITY offers an astonishing array of programs catered to offer every person with an idea a chance to turn their biggest ideas into effective entrepreneurial action. Their website includes a comprehensive overview of their mission and answers the kinds of questions that an abstract group like CITY is designed to help you ask.

Connecting with CITY is easy. They have that greet every stage of the creative process. They categorize their main resources into people, programs, events, and funding.

Should you be looking to knock brains with an expert, you might try signing up to stop by for office hours with a CITY mentor, who can work through your latest vision with you. You can easily imagine the kinds of ranging expertise manifested among the staff of CITY. It doesn’t matter if you’re pitching the latest and greatest CPE-supporting medical device or plotting a new religion that will promote social justice once and for all, CITY has a mentor for you.

But maybe you’re already an expert on something yourself. Then, you might see if one of the CITY programs has something for you. Their programs are split into four categories: Inspire, Build, Learn, Connect, and they aim to cover every kind of creative timespan. You can review their offerings as you go, hitting up drop-in brainstorm sessions until you feel ready to take your ideas to intensive multi-week seminars.

And if you don’t quite have a particular idea yet, CITY offers an ever-changing variety of opportunities to get on the scene and grab one for yourself. Their events calendar displays a cornucopia of opportunities to meet and greet people and start planning wheat you might do. Scroll through the offerings once in a while, considering which networks might excite you and which talks might turn your commute home into an idea lab.

Of course, no group that focuses on people and their ideas would be complete without a way to fund them. CITY hosts their own funds for student innovation and student events up to $1,000. Beyond that, they also support two of the five $25,000 university entrepreneurship prizes, and they can help you make your pitch for all of them. And if they don’t have a direct line to a funding stream that suits your project, you can bet your bottom dollar that they have an expert who knows how to find one for you.

Moral of the story: All of the questions that brought you to the Divinity School might be big and getting bigger all the time, but they don’t have to be abstract. Turn your work around with a visit to the CITY center. You could be astonished to discover how actionable those elusive ideas in your last term paper are, after all.