Jeff Sorensen (AB ’12) and Tim Pituch (BS ’12) were months from graduating when they hit what could be called a quarter-life crisis.
“I didn’t know what meaningful work was going to be for me, or what direction I was going—I felt directionless,” Sorensen reflected. “Tim and I were in 16th grade, and we’d been through all this education, and we never had a formal space in our education to ask:
If you could change something in the world, what would it be?
In search of answers, Sorensen and Pituch—along with their housemates, Angelle Kettlewell (AB ’14) and Michael Maiorano (AB ’13)—started meeting with student organizations across campus. They discovered that many organizations were siloed and lacked the resources and collaboration to create positive change. They wondered how they could bring these organizations together and empower an entrepreneurial group of student innovators. Their answer was optiMize.
“We had no idea what we were doing. We put out an application before we even knew what the program would be,” Sorensen reflected. “But people loved our idea and applied, and we realized we had to build a program.”
Before long, optiMize teamed up with United Way and a number of units across campus. A year later, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) brought the program under its wing and hired Sorensen as director. optiMize has been a part of LSA ever since.
optiMize is an on-campus community for innovators. Most students join the organization via its Social Innovation Challenge: a 6-month, co-curricular project incubator that includes collaboration events, mentorship, and skill-building workshops.
