For senior materials science major Laura Veldhuis, business and innovation have long been part of her game. In high school, she was on a team that received a $6,000 grant from MIT as part of a design contest; their resulting prototype-a device that, deriving its power from a moving bicycle, recharged USB-connectable electronics-thrilled the assembled crowd in Cambridge. At Homewood, despite her heavy course load, through the CLE’s Hopkins Student Enterprises program, she ran a cake and care package delivery service for two years, arranging everything from storage of the delectables to marketing the service to parents nationwide
Learning experiences for sure, but nothing compared to her present position interning in the Whiting School’s Office of Technology Transfer’s Intellectual Property department. Each day she delves into the underbelly of nearly every lab associated with the Whiting School, sifting through research papers that could lead to commercialized products. She is awed by what she encounters.
“I feel like everybody would be so excited if they could see all the things I read, all the provisional patents we have. The things people are working on are so interesting-crazy stuff that almost sounds like science fiction and interesting medical devices,” says Veldhuis.
For Veldhuis, the internship is the actualization of both her own interests and lessons learned as part of her E&M minor. Several of her professors, including Tim Weihs and Howard Katz, have either worked in industry or have their own companies. They spoke freely of their delight in going from bench to market, taking their work and shaping it into products that benefit the public. Veldhuis uses the word “phenomenal” to describe her business law classes (“Great profs who really knew their stuff!”) but saves favorite class status for senior lecturer Lawrence Aronhime’s Entrepreneurship course.
“Every single week we had to come up with a new idea and different frameworks for how to develop that idea. It was a good time, perfect for people like me who like to play around with ideas,” she says.
With graduation just around the corner, Veldhuis, who is working on transparent conductive oxides in Katz’s lab (think of the glass screen on an iPhone, and you’ve got one such example), says her melding of business with engineering has her considering numerous options. Consulting, venture capital, patent law, perhaps continuing on with an MSEM…one thing she knows is that, in her mind, basic and applied engineering are forever intertwined.
“I think there’s a revolving door for engineers, where you work in industry for a bit, come back to academia and get a master’s or PhD, then flow back and forth,” says Veldhuis. “It’s a nice way to keep ideas fresh.”