Trinity College’s Tech-Edge, a summer program that bridges the liberal arts and the future of digital technology, launches its second annual three-week session on June 7 with the addition of a Future of Work Forum focused on preparing students to adapt to the new, changing landscape of work via panels with companies and industry professionals.
Part of the Trinity-Infosys Applied Learning Initiative, an unprecedented collaboration between the college and the global tech giant, Tech-Edge is designed to give liberal arts undergraduate students and recent college graduates with little or no STEM background the core skills in technology and business innovation necessary to prepare them for the future of work.
Trinity Trustee Lou Shipley ’85, a three-time tech CEO and a lecturer at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management who also was a 2020 Tech-Edge instructor, noted the benefits of the program. “Tech-Edge provides a good balance of important business and technology fundamentals and concepts that are quickly grasped by liberal arts students whose skills include creative thinking, problem-solving, and effective communications,” he said. Shipley added that his own daughter, Vanessa, a current student at Colgate University, took part in the program, along with participants from several other colleges and universities, including Middlebury College and Colby College, as well as Trinity.
While Tech-Edge originally was envisioned as being held in person, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift to remote learning in 2020. That format continues in 2021, with participants acquiring basic technology skills—including programming and software development basics, cybersecurity fundamentals, and data analysis and visualization—in remote sessions taught by Trinity faculty members. Business innovation fundamentals are led by industry experts in the fields of accounting, marketing, finance, operations, and strategy, as well as Infosys-powered digital technology.
Innovative sessions include a Design Thinking boot camp, which introduces participants to a human-centered process for creative problem-solving. That process is then put to use in a two-day real-world challenge, where participants solve a business problem for a company or nonprofit.
Participants who complete the Tech-Edge program—led by faculty directors Takunari Miyazaki, associate dean for faculty development and associate professor of computer science, and Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, faculty director of innovation initiatives and associate professor of history—receive a digital badge that can be published on social media, including LinkedIn.
Applications for next year’s program will be available in early 2022.
For more information about Tech-Edge or the Trinity-Infosys Applied Learning Initiative, please visit https://www.trincoll.edu/tech-edge/