Ji Mi Choi
NSF I-Corps Hub: Desert and Pacific Region Director
NSF I-Corps Hub: Desert and Pacific Region Lead Instructor
NSF I-Corps: National Lead Instructor
Why am I an instructor?
As an NSF I-Corps instructor, I have the opportunity to work with so many different teams (comprised of faculty, staff, students, community members, experienced industry mentors) and their potential solutions, aiming to solve real-world problems with new products and services. Whether serving on a teaching team for our regional programs or for a national program, I-Corps instructors have the privilege to work with some pretty extraordinary people advancing technological and scientific inventions to impactful innovations. Plus, I-Corps instructors are like-minded in their focus to support people trying to create societal value – it’s a good group to be a part of!
What is exciting about participating in I-Corps?
Most teams begin I-Corps from their perspective – they are experts in their research, their solutions space but over the course of I-Corps, participants develop and deploy a mindset and skills to be steeped in a problem space – really understanding what potential customers need and want, and why they need new solutions, if they need new solutions. This shift from a “my invention is great because…” to a deeper understanding of what value their inventions create for whom and why is gratifying. Even when I-Corps participants determine “there’s no there, there” – it’s a gift! What a great outcome – to learn in a relatively short period of time that either there is a real use-case and need for their proposed solutions or to learn that for whatever reason, it’s not worth pursuing. People spend months, years, wishing and dreaming about things – I-Corps provides a rigorous, disciplined, time-bound process to explore and make a determination of something worth pursuing.
What do I have to offer as an instructor?
As an instructor who has been involved with I-Corps for nearly a decade (as an educator, as an I-Corps Site PI, as a Hub Director and Lead Instructor), I have accrued experience and perspective to offer after working with hundreds of teams. Though I am not a subject matter expert in the technical fields our participants come from, I have honed my skills and knowledge of the I-Corps method and process and think I’ve been able to share that successfully with others without a lot of jargon and in an accessible way for a broad variety of ideas. And I have a weird brain for socking away trivia so can often reach into my mind for some relevant fact or piece of information that may be helpful to teams!
