Video Transcript
[Sierra Sandison, Boise State Allumni, Mechanical Engineering Degree]: I graduated from the College of Engineering in 2022, with my degree in Mechanical Engineering. Initially, I was actually majoring in business, but I’d always been really interested in engineering and entrepreneurship. In 2021, I had bought my own 3D printer and I had had this little slug toy go viral on TikTok. Everyone in the comments was begging for me to sell them and I had a bunch of 3D printing, engineering expertise, but I didn’t know the first thing on how to get started selling something.
[Sierra]: Like I could not meet demand; with my one printer it took nine hours to print one slug, and there were thousands, and thousands of people wanting to order from me. So, that’s where kind of the Venture College came in. It is there to provide resources for students like me that want to start their own venture and be entrepreneurs after graduation. I competed in the Idaho Entrepreneurship Challenge and won my track, which gave me $7,000 to expand up to, I think, I have like 30 3D printers now, and a lot of that came from that Venture College Seed funding.
[Sierra]: So that was huge from taking me from 1 to 1 3D printer in my living room to almost 33 3D printers in my garage at this point, and helped me meet demand. So I switched to engineering, it was super interesting to me. It was really awesome to have a combination of getting my degree from the College of Engineering, while still having access to everything the Venture College offers.
[Sierra]: So three years later, I have now launched Fidget Friends. So I brought in a manufacturer for the slugs. I’ve added an alligator, a shark, a dolphin, a lobster, I always forget the lobster, and then also squishy slugs, and we have these mini slug keychains now, they’re so cute! I am very passionate about entrepreneurship and engineering, and bringing resources for both of those things to rural Idaho youth, specifically. So a dream of mine is to hopefully someday get a 3D printer in every rural Idaho high school, because if I had had access to a 3D printer in high school, that would have been game changing. I would love to bring more resources and education to the rural parts of our state, but for now, I’m focused on scaling up fidget friends, and I’m so glad I have the Venture College to help me out while I do that.