UI students will launch class project in Vegas with $50,000

IOWA CITY - A group of University of Iowa students won't have to visit the poker tables to find high stakes in Las Vegas this summer.

The 14 students have spent the spring semester in an unorthodox class, “Reimagining Downtown,” dreaming up sustainable project ideas to positively impact downtown Las Vegas, and now they have $50,000 riding on their plan.

Their chosen idea, a healthy food truck coupled with educational efforts in the community about healthy eating, will be put into practice by the students using $50,000 in seed money from Tony Hsieh, chief executive officer of Zappos, which is moving its headquarters to downtown Las Vegas.

The students visited Las Vegas during spring break to gather information and will spend June and July in Vegas to launch their plan and lay the groundwork. They hope local partnerships and a good business model will make the effort viable once they pack their bags and leave Las Vegas.

“The idea was to have the students thinking big,” said David Gould, professor of the Reimagining Downtown class and associate director for Professional Student Development at the UI. “I know one thing for sure, these students really care about making a difference.”

Mix of majors

The 14 students - among them psychology, finance, political science, human physiology and theater majors - had their first luck in even being chosen for the class. “A lot” of students applied for the first-time class and were vetted by a 12-person selection committee that included business faculty and the UI Honors Program.

Gould said grade-point average wasn't that important. Rather, he was looking for enthusiastic students who were passionate about making a difference in this community design experiment.

Beyond the lure of Las Vegas, the unusual nature of the class was inviting for the students.

“The whole idea behind it, we could have control of our own project and create something in a different community,” said Kelsey Hastings, 21, a junior in marketing. “Immediately I was like, ‘This is not your average class.'?”

The students went into the class with a lot of unknowns - what would their project be, who could they work with to get it done, what expertise would they need to be successful - and had to work through that ambiguity all semester.

That “real world” aspect has been a great learning experience, said Sevy Perez, 20, a sophomore in interdepartmental studies. He recalls he dropped the only business course he has taken because he found it too boring, but in this class he's spent hours working on a name and logo for the food truck the students will help launch.

“With what I want to do for a living, you're not going to learn that from a book or from a lecture,” Perez said. “I think the emphasis on real-world interactivity is sort of the new classroom.”

Lessons into practice

Phil Monfils, a senior in marketing and economics, said in many business classes he learns about things in theory. In this class, he put those lessons into practice. Monfils, 22, works a lot on market research, studying the demographics of downtown Las Vegas and the buying habits of that group.

“This is actually coming up with an idea from scratch, one that would work in the Las Vegas area,” he said. “We build the foundation for this to go, and it has to work after we leave.”

When most people think of Las Vegas, they think of the glitzy, bustling Strip. The UI students are focused on a different part of the city, downtown neighborhoods with more vacant lots and untapped potential.

The partnership with Hsieh and his Las Vegas “Downtown Project” happened when Gould pitched him the class idea over lunch last summer. Gould got to known Hsieh when Gould reached out to the online entrepreneur a few years ago, asking him to speak to his new UI course “Life Design.” Hsieh was gracious with his time and was inspiring to those students, Gould said.

Downtown Project

So when Gould thought of this new class idea, focused on spending a semester on one real-world problem, Hsieh was among the people Gould contacted in looking for a partner. Hsieh's Downtown Project is investing $350 million in the revitalization of downtown Las Vegas, and he offered $50,000 for the UI students' involvement.

The students during the semester winnowed their big ideas to three, which they pitched to Hsieh during the spring break visit. After more investigation and “shark tank” pitches with Iowa City entrepreneurs, the food truck with frozen fruit treats was chosen.

This summer they'll launch the truck with Las Vegas-based partners and spend their days on educational efforts in the community and things like market research for taste-testing and setting prices.

The project is “something real, something that's got failure attached to it,” Gould said.

“The experiment is based on a very simple idea: that 20-somethings have a very important voice to offer the community and often opportunity, resources and experience keep them from that,” he said. “The question is, if you give them the opportunity, if you give them some real resources ... can they do something really remarkable?”