McNeil Innovators: Bailey Koenig builds bridges between student projects and entrepreneurship

In her first year at Mines, Bailey Koenig worked on several hands-on class projects, bringing innovative ideas to life.  

One of those projects, a glove for people with arthritis that makes moving their hands easier, sparked a curiosity about how to move a project created in a class into a viable product for the public. 

 As a mechanical engineering major focusing on biomechanics, Koenig felt like even though she had the technical skills to build these projects, she wasn’t sure how to best gain the entrepreneurial skills she needed to take them further. 

That’s when a professor suggested she apply to be a Nickoloff Fellow through the McNeil Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The program supports two students for three years at Mines, connecting them with resources and support to serve as ambassadors for the Mines entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem.  

“During my freshman year, I was really interested in moving projects forward with entrepreneurship, but I just didn’t know how,” Koenig said. “When I learned about the Nickoloff fellowship, I saw it as an opportunity for me to learn how to do that and also help others like me who are doing all these project-based classes and would be great entrepreneurs but just don’t know what to do. I get to help them move forward.” 

As a Nickoloff Fellow, Koenig has been focused this fall on promoting the Colorado Impact Challenge, an event bringing together multidisciplinary cohorts of university students from around the Denver metro area to solve meaningful, real-world problems, taking place Oct. 20 through Nov. 9.  

Now in her second year at Mines, Koenig said she is passionate about not only developing her own entrepreneurship skills but also helping Mines students connect with similar opportunities available to them.  

Q: What is the Nickoloff Fellowship and how have you been involved? 

Bailey Koenig: It’s focused on getting more student involvement in entrepreneurship and the Beck Center, McNeil and that whole ecosystem. I know a lot of students don’t even know these opportunities exist, so it’s all about making it more accessible for any Mines student to get involved in entrepreneurship. It’s such a great program and I love it.  

Q: What has your involvement been with the Colorado Impact Challenge? 

Koenig: The main project I’m working on right now is the Colorado Impact Challenge. I’ve been promoting it to students and have been building an app so students can connect with it beforehand and during the event. They’ve been using it to build teams, and it’s been cool to see that community start to come together. My experience with coding has been taking some mechanical engineering coding classes and an Intro to Python class, but that’s about it. I jumped into it and used vibe coding to build the app. It’s been a really fun experience.  

Q: What’s next in your Nickoloff Fellowship experience? 

Koenig: I’ll keep talking with students, helping them connect with the McNeil Center. I want to work on an E& I ecosystem “map” that a student can get and see all of the entrepreneurial outlets they have here on campus – the classes you can take, which professors you can talk to, the different centers, just all the avenues that students could look into right here at Mines.