Clare Hyland is a junior from Kansas City, Kansas, majoring in chemical engineering at Notre Dame. She is the first person in her family to attend Notre Dame, and was drawn to its highly regarded engineering program and the opportunities she would have at a University of its size.
This past April she began working with Kunigunda Szentes (the IDEA Center's New Venture Development and Invention Program Manager) and Steve Asiala (the IDEA Center's Faculty Engagement Associate) as a Technical Market Analyst.
In this role, Clare receives faculty invention disclosures and applies market sizing and competitive landscape analysis in order to develop a plan forward for the faculty member and their invention. The question she is attempting to answer is whether the IDEA Center will want to move forward with the professor to develop a commercialization plan for the new technology or invention.
Clare collaborates with a team of student interns, all of whom work between 12 and 20 hours a week, currently in a remote fashion, for the IDEA Center.
"The thing I have enjoyed the most about this experience is learning about the inventions Notre Dame professors come up with and how their solutions might be applied to real world problems," says Clare. Working with professors and researchers on campus has expanded her awareness of the work going on in Notre Dame labs, and of the depth and breadth of the discovery and invention going on all the time.
She explains, "The IDEA Center offers many opportunities to students. If you are interested in how a faculty or community member's solution goes from ideation to real-world application, you should look into working as an analyst. I used to feel like there was so much mystery surrounding how this happened."
Because of her work in the IDEA Center, Clare has begun to think seriously about pursuing a career in consulting. "I really like the workflow of taking on a project, working on it closely for some weeks, and then moving on to a different project." Next summer, Clare will be interning with PwC in Chicago as a technology consulting intern.