Impact Challenge

Fellowship and Grant Prizes

• The first-place team will receive a $10,000 fellowship plus Career Center experiential learning fellowships for up to three continuing Carleton students. 
• The second-place team will receive Career Center experiential learning fellowships for up to two continuing Carleton students.
• (Participating teams who do not win one of the two prizes can still be considered for Career Center funding for experiential learning through the regular decision process.)
• If you do plan to take a job at Carleton over the summer in addition to receiving fellowship money, you must discuss this with Nathan Grawe.
• Fellowship funds may be considered taxable income. Consult your tax professional.

Eligibility

• Teams must include two or more Carleton students. Non-Carls may be included in the team if they are useful to the venture’s success. While there is no maximum team size, we recommend no more than three or four students in total. 
• Teams will indicate interest by emailing Nathan Grawe ideally by October 5, 2026 and no later than Octboer 26, 2025. (Note: The idea behind your venture shift as your project evolves. You don’t need to have everything sorted when you enter the program.)
• Teams will complete online training
• Teams will meet with assigned alumni mentor in a series of four virtual meetings (45 minutes to an hour)
• Teams will meet with Nathan or Bruce for four check-in meetings
• All team members who are not on leave or on an off campus studies program will attend the full pitch competition
• All winning teams will create a brief video at the end of the summer sharing their experience building their venture to be used internally to generate student interest in the Challenge.
• All students receiving Career Center funding for experiential learning will complete all required follow-ups including the “Bring Back” to share about the work and foster campus interest in Carleton fellowships and donor acknowledgement.

Proposal Guidelines

• Written Proposal Guidelines
• Pitch Guidelines

Important Dates

• September 30, 2025, 12-1pm, Willis 204– Information Session
• October 17, 2025: Email Nathan Grawe indicating intent to participate. Include names of all known team members and a brief description of your idea.
• January 12, 2026 5:00PM: Email written proposal to Nathan Grawe.
• January 19, 2026: Finalists invited to pitch session
• February 14, 2026 1:30–4:30PM: Final pitch competition and prize announcements

2026 Impact Challenge Winners

Recruit Tracker

• 2025: SUSARA – Masyn Rykus ’25 and Annanya Sinha ’25; Deebo – Albert Ezem Osakwe ’25 and Elhadji Amadou Touré
• 2024: Persimmon – Nic Berry ’24, Albert Jing ’25, Geoffrey Jing ’25, and Duy Nguyen ’25; Sportslink – Quinn Brannon ’25 and Sam Zacks ’25
• 2023: Dou Read – Tan Zhou ’25, Kevin Bui ’24, and Tim Zhang
• 2022: Upprentice – Victor Hyuang ’23 and Lily Li ’23; Reveal Jonah Doctor-Loeb ‘25, Gabe Kaplan ‘25, Etta Humes ‘25, Tate Fuller ‘25, Malachy Guzman ‘25, Seven Delgado ‘25
• 2021: [Discussify] – Kevin Bui ’24, Quoc Nguyen ’23, and Shannon Liu ’23; K. N. Y. Skating Experience (Northfield Enterprise Center Prize) – Kenya Symone Cooper ’21 and Venecia Mitchell ’21

• 2020: 句話 JUHUA – Brandon Moy ’20, John Mullan ’20, and Alan Zheng ’20
• 2019: The Participation Station – Phil Donnelly ’22 and Madhav Mohan ’22
• 2018: E and E: Liberal Arts for the 21st Century – Kwaku Bodom ’19, Chris Anisowicz ’18 and Brandon Fabel ’18; Switch – Keaton Mertz ’18 (Chemistry) and Chenxi Sun ’18 (2nd Place Team representing Carleton at the 8th Minnesota Entrepreneurship Kick-off in March 2018)
• 2017: Adisa – Claire Tagoe ’18 and Sabastian Mugazambi ’17; Lift Education Consultants – Robert Kearney ’17, Sijin “Cathy” Chen ’17, and Jacob Snyder-Hansen
• 2016: Northfield Cannon Dairy: Minnesota Nice Cream – Beau Smit ’17 and Rohan Mukherjee ’19; Campus Concierge – Mitchell Biewen ’17 and Jeremy Keane ’17