Fellow Spotlight- Juan Tramontin

Juan Tramontin, member of BLF ’20 majoring in Logistics Management and minoring in Engineering and Italian is taking his passion for sustainability to the next level. 

Through the Honors Integrated Business & Engineering program (IBE) here at Ohio State, Juan was able to meet fellow students George Valcarcel, Liyang Feng, and Kai Vogeler, who inspired him as being three of the most hard-working, ambitious, and creative men at this campus. As they grew in the IBE program, they began to learn about the various opportunities that Ohio State has, while also discovering areas where Ohio State can improve and innovate. Through their motivation to make a sustainable impact on the OSU campus, Juan, George, Liyang and Kai discovered the University Innovation Fellowship program. The UIF program was started at the Hasso Platner D.School at Stanford University and it has trained and mentored over 1,200 students from over 216 schools around the world. Juan and his team knew this was the right step for them, and immediately began the process to apply for this prestigious program.

To become a University Fellow, Juan and his team were tasked with completing an intensive six-week long course that is coordinated and evaluated by professors and faculty at Stanford University. During those six weeks, they diligently mapped out the existing landscape for Innovation & Entrepreneurship on campus, communicated with students and faculty to pinpoint holes in this landscape, where they then used entrepreneurial mindset techniques to develop prototypes and possible solutions for these areas of improvement. Next, the group met with influential faculty, administration and student stakeholders to discuss their ideas and thoroughly plan out steps for the future. While they have succeeded and become official Fellows, they have transformative initiatives that they will be working on for the duration of their time at Ohio State. The team is passionate and motivated to leave a lasting impact, as they look to improve curriculum, spaces on campus, and co-curricular activities.

Juan explains, “I am incredibly passionate about this program because of my desire to create sustainable and impactful change on my campus. Whether it is through my organizations, my classes, Buckeye Leadership Fellows, or the University Innovation Fellowship, I have always sought out ways to represent my beliefs and ideas by creating opportunities or experiences at Ohio State. My favorite part about UIF is that I am able to use my  advanced innovative-mindset skills to create spaces on campus that will inspire students, to promote change in our curriculum that will develop students, and to grow an organization that we started, Iris, to bridge the gap between learned techniques and real-world experiences.”

Juan’s involvement in the UIF program displays his passion for leadership and meaningful change, “Through this program we have learned skills that any leader can utilize and how to flex each skills to benefit certain distinct situations. I have specifically learned how to use the entrepreneurial mindset to view problems from countless perspectives, how to zoom in and focus on specific details while simultaneously building towards a big picture idea, and finally how to communicate in interdisciplinary teams with students from unique backgrounds to create a manageable and high-performing atmosphere.”

If you are interested in learning more about Juan’s project, please view the video at this link: https://youtu.be/QxSnUfYJpSY