Alumni Help Choose DS Award Winners
Thanks to some awesone volunteers, the awards process for Design Studio looked a little different this year. Nominations were submitted by faculty, staff, and students as usual. This year sponsors and coaches were also encouraged to submit teams and individuals for Platinum, Gold, Rockstar, Intern of the Year, and Hall of Fame. The top six recipients were then forwarded to a panel of former Design Studio award winners, including Luke Bogus, Caitlin Bales Russell, Vinay Singh, Matthew Meacham, Janelle Rickstrew Patton, Clay Upton, and Rachel Dahlman. This panel voted to choose this year's winners. Thanks to all for your help in making this process run smoothly and for providing an independent perspective on the selection process!
Design Studio Showcase
1 p.m. CDT May 5th Innovation Campus
All alumni are invited to Design Studio Showcase, on Friday, May 5th on Nebraska Innovation Campus. At 1 p.m. CDT, our spring speaker Divya Bhat, who works as a visiting partner with Y Combinator, will join us virtually. Divya is a 2x YC alum: first as co-founder of Jamglue (YC S06), a popular online music remixing platform + community, and again as co-founder of Rickshaw (YC W14), a local delivery platform that enabled any merchant to offer same-day delivery services to their customers without managing their own drivers and logistics. At Rickshaw, she built a profitable business with a small, scrappy team before being acquired by Doordash, where she was a Director of Product. In between Jamglue and Rickshaw, Divya was the Director of the Trulia Rentals team, which she helped start, launch, and grow in preparation for Trulia’s 2013 IPO. Recently, she was Chief Product Officer at Virta Health where she led Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Design through a period of rapid scaling.
Divya has Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics with Computer Science, and Management Science from MIT and a Master’s degree in Genome Sciences from the University of Washington. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two kids.
Showcase will start immediately afterward with project demonstrations from 2 to 4 p.m. and awards ceremony at 4 p.m. Come see what the students have been working on this year! To get details on parking and to RSVP, visit the Showcase page.
Special thanks from Design Studio!
Design Studio would like to thank all alumni who helped coach teams this year: Neema Bahramzad, Nick Ebert, Rees Klintworth, Jacob Sanchez, Trevor & Ashlyn (Lee) Slawnyk, and Brian Zimmer. Special thanks to Daric Teske who worked as an Academic Lead. And special thanks to our pitch competition judges Neema Bahramzad and John Wirtz. Please let us know if you would like to get involved in Design Studio next year!
Retirement news
Cheryl Nelson, Director of Design Studio, has decided to retire effective May 19. Cheryl has been a key contributor to the Raikes School as a Program Lead, Director, and leadership class instructor. After five years of service in Design Studio, Cheryl is looking forward to traveling and focusing on other new business ventures. Thank you, Cheryl!