Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”

As the Class of 2015 continues their first term, they’re shifting from beginnings to progress. We’re excited to share a brief update about the experiences that are keeping our students busy this fall. From Chicago to Vancouver to the Bay Area and beyond, these 12 individuals are learning and doing in diverse environments across a range of fields and industries. It’s exciting. It’s hard work. And it’s all part of the design-your-education process.

Check them out:

Together at EPIC, Toph Carter and Chevy Williams are rubbing elbows with the greatest designers, creators, and change-agents of Chicago to tell the story of EPIC’s impact in a meaningful way. They’re also creating an EPIC celebration to showcase this year's work with Chicago's Non-Profits.

Nicole McCabe is working with strategic design firm Rule29 where she's helping them articulate and refine their ethos surrounding the role of culture in their own organization by conducting research and interviews, with an eye to creating a lecture on the subject.

Debbie Paterson is at IDEO in San Francisco as a Community Manager and Outreach Coordinator for OpenIDEO’s Ebola Response Challenge, a project that seeks new ideas to help equip healthcare workers on the ground in West Africa.

At Holiday Jones, a boutique hostel operator based in Chicago, Stephanie Kang is hard at work on organizational design and product development.

Tuere Wiggins is exploring the intersection of creativity, culture, and business at Lapiz, Leo Burnett's award-winning ad agency dedicated to Latin American markets.

Also at Lapiz, Olenka Hand is using the design thinking process to discover how the workspace influences connection, collaboration and creativity.

At the STEM Fest/Ten80 EXPO, an event meant to inspire and engage Chicago-area high school students to pursue STEM education and careers, Jonathan Lazatin talked with students about hybrid electric aircraft research and assembled a mini-activity where they wired electric motors to a plane. He made a video about it, too.

Lance Henderstein is taking on Content Creation at Cause+Affect, a brand design agency based in Vancouver.

At Aquanaut Brewing Company, a newly launched facet of Doejo, Zak Tracy is using a company and brand building toolbox to help to turn a hand-crafted concept into best-in-class business.

Our young prototyper Zeke Bogusky is at Beacon Street Studios in Venice Beach where he is working alongside professionals to learn sound engineering and music production.

Behind the scenes, two of our students are laying the foundation for a riveting second term experience with our friends at Dev Bootcamp. We’ll explain more about this soon.

And finally, a small team of EXP2 students led by Melanie Kahl will be working on Ei's scaling project over the course of the program. This term, they're conducting internal and external interviews to gather diverse perspectives from across the organization to begin ideating and prototyping a scaled-up version of Ei.

For Ei students, each term can consist of a single in-depth experience lasting the duration of the term or a variety of experiences taking place either consecutively or concurrently. Each student’s education is personal, contingent on their learning plan and goals, but what makes that education meaningful is the process of intention, action, reflection, and sharing their learnings with a community. Although students take individual paths through the year, they are bound by a common journey—that of transformation and growth through great risk.

Henry Ford was an innovator, too. He transformed the automotive industry and revolutionized mass production. He also believed in the power of community: working together is success, he said. As the year goes on, our students will continue to work and learn together and to share with you the discoveries they make as they design their own education.

If you’d like to learn more about hosting an Ei student now or in the future, just send us an email and we'll share a conversation.