Nick Winter Scott Erickson George Saines Alia Kate Nathaniel Gelb

Five graduating seniors have received Creativity & Leadership Fellowships from Oberlin College to carry out their entrepreneurial ventures starting this summer.

The Creativity & Leadership Fellowships are competitive awards that give students funding and peer support to move innovative ideas from concept to reality. Three grants ranging from $8,000 to $30,000 will help fund the projects for one year.   The winners will spend the next year implementing their projects with guidance from alumni mentors.  

Nick Winter, Scott Erickson, and George Saines received $30,000 for a team project to create software designed to revolutionize how students of Chinese language learn to write and remember characters. Their proposed software, which they have dubbed "Skritter," will use handwriting recognition and adaptive learning methods to automate the learning process, so that students can focus on writing characters and improving their writing as a result of immediate feedback.

Winter will graduate in May with degrees in computer science, math, and East Asian Studies. Erickson will earn a degree in computer science and Saines a degree in economics and cinema studies.

Alia Kate, a politics major with a concentration in international relations, received $20,000 for a fair-trade venture called Kantara Crafts. The company will export quality artisan goods from cooperatives in Morocco to the United States, seeking to bridge the gap between women artisans in Morocco and socially conscious communities in the U.S.

Nathaniel Gelb, a psychology major, received $8,000 to create "Rockstarz," a mobile music clinic that will travel to summer camps to teach children the joy of playing music. During a weeklong program, experienced teachers will introduce youth campers to drums, bass guitar, electric guitar, and collaborating in a rock band. The clinic will also feature a session on deejaying skills. At the end of the session, the middle-school students will record themselves and take part in a dance social for the entire camp.

Being a part of the Creativity & Leadership network has given Winter and his team the confidence to put their ideas into action.

"When we first thought of the idea and started working on the handwriting recognition algorithms, we had only vague ideas of how we were going to turn it into a business," Winter says. "As much as we needed initial funding, we were just as hungry for business contacts, mentoring, and advice. When you're just three guys in a room and your friends like your idea, that's a lot different than getting feedback from successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and Chinese language educators."

Winter says his team's goal is to bring Chinese literacy into reach for more students. He says students often give up on reviewing and writing characters because the information is difficult to retain using flashcards. The software will help by combining a new type of handwriting recognition—giving students an immediate, stroke-level feedback without having to check themselves—with an adaptive learning system that will manage the character learning process.

"Chinese characters are too beautiful to become a 'keyboard only' language. No one wants to see that," Winter says. "Yet, nothing out there is solving these hard problems."

The Creativity & Leadership Project at Oberlin grounds entrepreneurship in the liberal arts and reflects Oberlin's musical and artistic excellence.   It draws on both for-profit and non-profit models of entrepreneurship and so affirms Oberlin's longstanding commitment to preparing students for leadership and civic engagement. The project is part of the Northeast Ohio Collegiate Entrepreneurship Program, a Kauffman Campuses (SM) initiative funded by the Burton D. Morgan Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Deborah Hoover, president of the Morgan Foundation, says the Oberlin fellowship recipients have creatively combined their liberal arts passion with a profit-making venture involving innovation and risk.

"The Morgan-Kauffman Northeast Ohio Collegiate Entrepreneurship Program is inspiring students on liberal arts campuses to view their studies in a new light," Hoover says. "While profit is clearly a goal, these projects capture a social vision. All of us at The Burton D. Morgan Foundation will be anxious to hear how the projects evolve in the coming months."

The Creativity & Leadership fellowship competition is open to individual students or groups of students in their final year at Oberlin. A multidisciplinary committee of faculty, administrators, alumni, and northeast Ohio entrepreneurs oversee the program and review the fellowship applications.