Lukas Wenrick's blog

When I came out to Arizona State University to serve as a UI Fellow, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I had never even been to the university when I accepted my offer and wasn’t even sure what my day to day would look like. Yet, after 13 months of a roller coaster experience, I can definitively say that this has been the most gratifying professional experiences of my life. I've grown more during this short period of time than I ever thought possible. 

Within the first hour of my first day as a University Innovation Fellow, I met with my direct supervisor, Luke Tate, and the leader of the UI Office, Jacqueline Smith. I was handed a paper with my initial assignments and explained that these would be ongoing projects. What I didn’t know was that these projects would take months of research, dozens of meetings, and countless reports -- just to scratch the surface.

My first two assignments were:

I was born and raised in a small rural community in Midwest Ohio. I had only left this small community a handful of times before going off to college -- also in Midwest Ohio. Over the years, my normal was represented by snow-covered winter mornings, humid summer days, and the trees growing their leaves only to have them fall to the ground several months later. When I moved to Boston, what I knew as normal didn’t change much.