While watching the 2012 Olympics, Avika Bansal fell in love with fencing.
"I was hooked by the speed and the agility of the people who were competing," said Bansal (left), a rising junior in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. "I told my mom I was going to do this. I didn't look back from there."
She started fencing in sixth grade, sharpening her skills enough to become a nationally ranked fencer before college. While competing, she noticed places where the sport could be improved, in particular in how athletes can review and critique performance.
"The coaching technology in fencing is quite antiquated compared to other sports like golf, swimming or football where you can use digital tools and advanced technology to analyze the exact angle where the quarterback threw the football or the exact angle of which a golfer swung his club,” Bansal said. "But there wasn't anything really like that in fencing."
So, she created TurnPRO, an app that provides tools to allow users to share videos, images and notes with coaches, and receive more technical and tailored feedback. With a simple user interface, this app can harness the power of new technology to help fencers, and perhaps other types of athletes, to elevate their skills.
"It's been a great journey so far. I'm looking to implement a lot more data analysis to track performance over an extended time," Bansal said.
Bansal is a member of CMU's Innovation Scholars program, which provides academic coursework, experience working in a startup, networking and mentorship to rising juniors. Sonya Ford is the manager of the Innovation Scholars Program within CMU's Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Thirteen students were chosen for this year's cohort.
"We look for entrepreneurially minded, passionate undergraduate students who have a desire to engage and build a network with the other Innovation Scholars as well as the Swartz Center," Ford said.
Samarth Gowda, a rising senior in statistics and data science, is in his second year of the Innovation Scholars program and a familiar face at the Swartz Center where his platform Pralent is being tested. An all-in-one platform for organizations to manage their professional communities, it grew out of Gowda's work with CMU's Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Association, where he was president this past year.
"I reached out to the Swartz Center's Dave Mawhinney, Sonya Ford and Allyson Hince who said, 'Let's try it,'" Gowda said. "We worked together to build different features. We're hoping to launch the expanded version shortly."
Mawhinney, executive director for the Swartz Center, said that in the past decade more than 400 startups linked to CMU have raised more than $7 billion in follow-on funding. The Innovation Scholars program, now in its eighth year, seeks to increase the number of startup companies initiated by or involving undergraduate students.