Madelynn Carter (she/her)

The Five North Project

Madelynn is a senior at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and spent her past summer as working on The Five North Project as an optiMize Fellow. The Five North Project serves vulnerable communities and schools by providing technology and educational resources. This year, Madelynn is a peer advisor on the optiMize team. 

Learn more about The Five North Project on their website or Instagram. 

At the end of my sophomore year, I was starting to feel like my classes and extracurricular activities were unfulfilling and repetitive. I expressed this to a friend, and discovered that he was feeling similarly. We began discussing ways we could make our time in undergrad more meaningful, and The Five North Project was born. As I started to work on our ideas and develop the non-profit, I found myself re-discovering excitement for the work that I was doing. When I found out about optiMize at the beginning of my junior year, it came at the perfect time. I was excited about the work I was putting into Five North and the prospects of making a difference in people’s lives and had started to find ways to incorporate my classwork into the work I was doing. Meanwhile, I started to attend optiMize workshops and was able to envision how I could use my education and university resources to benefit our project.

optiMize was helping me learn entrepreneurial and real-life skills that complimented the theoretical topics I covered in many of my classes. As a summer fellow, I was able to extend my learning further by working on my project full-time over the summer. I truly believe that the experiences I gained from working on The Five North Project are just as valuable as my diploma will be after graduating. If it weren’t for optiMize, our project wouldn’t have gotten off the ground, and I wouldn’t have gained these skills. 

The optiMize community also provided me with opportunities to connect with a community of students that understand what it’s like to work on a start-up project. Since joining optiMize I’ve been introduced to a very diverse and motivated student group, and in turn I’ve made many more cross-campus connections and have learned about industries and issues that weren’t covered by major. Starting a non-profit was often felt too complicated for myself and my two partners to handle, but the encouragement we received from optiMize kept us moving. Our project had many moving parts and I was learning how to handle logistics, non-profit management, fundraising, and much more, and optiMize helped connect us with other students, faculty, and mentors to give us guidance. 

I’ll be leaving Michigan with more confidence, a greater skill-set, and broader knowledge of social impact and social justice because of optiMize