From idea to reality

Parker Mitchell was uninspired. An engineering student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Mitchell had spent his last undergraduate co-op term improving door hinges for a 1998 Saturn automobile. That’s a fine task for an engineer, and yet he felt something was missing.

For his final-year project, he went looking for a more fulfilling topic—and he found it in some notes belonging to his professor’s late colleague, an engineer originally from India. The notes described the challenges of water and sanitation in India, and the statistics shocked Mitchell: one billion Indians live without access to clean water; 2.5 billion people worldwide live without adequate sanitation. So, for his project, he decided to create a household device that could provide enough clean water for a family of four and would cost less than $15. He had no idea at the time that it would eventually lead him and his classmate, George Roter, to veer from their expected career paths and found Engineers Without Borders—an organization that over the past decade has helped bring better agricultural technology to an estimated 10,000 farmers in developing countries around the world.

The fact is, plenty of real-world, practical ideas that go on to spawn successful careers often get their start in the ivory towers of academe. The classic school-project-turned-success story, narrated by business professors the world over, is FedEx—a company conceived in a Yale University economics paper. As the tale goes, FedEx founder Fred Smith received a failing grade for the project but, hoping to prove his prof wrong, went on to launch what is now one of the largest package delivery companies in the world. There’s as much fiction as fact in that story, of course—Smith has said he earned a “gentlemanly C”—but it neatly captures a dream shared by many university students: the brilliant concept (and therefore pupil) spurned by a professor but welcomed by the wide world as a success.

The FedEx route is rarely direct, of course. Mitchell, for instance, realized early on that a low-cost water filter would never solve India’s water problems. “I learned that technical solutions are only one small part of what is needed,” he says. Myriad factors in India meant that his filter would never be used for its intended purpose. But the experience changed his perspective on engineering as a profession. Could engineers put their skills to work by solving the problems facing poverty-stricken parts of the world? With that question in mind, Mitchell and Roter set off to learn about the organizational, cultural and social elements that would allow them to apply engineer-like problem-solving to the challenge of lessening world poverty. Now, Mitchell still sounds surprised that he ended up the co-CEO of a prominent NGO. “If someone had asked to put bets on people most likely in 10 years to be leading something, my name would have been in the bottom third of the list of everyone in my class,” he laughs.

Like Mitchell, Melissa Kluger had no idea where her education would take her when she started law school at the University of Toronto. After she completed an undergraduate arts degree at Queen’s University, Kluger enrolled in law in 1998 because she loved the university environment and “was looking for an excuse to stay in school.”

At U of T, she was surprised to discover that no publication existed for law students. So—as she had done at Queen’s, where she started a student creative writing magazine—she jumped at the chance to create a new student publication. “It was a time when there were a lot of opinions and emotion, and students needed a forum to talk,” she recalls. “Students were winning competitions, publishing papers, winning sports events—the kinds of things a community is built on. I felt compelled to fill this gap for our student community and our legal community.”