About
About The Forward Society.
The Forward Society brings students together to identify real problems, develop solutions, and turn strong ideas into real-world projects.
Mission
To foster the next generation of thinkers who challenge what exists, find possibility where others see problems, and create what comes next.
The founding belief
Most people skip straight to solutions.
A problem arrives and the room fills with fixes before anyone has agreed what is actually broken. The fix is then built, and it works, and it solves something nobody needed solved.
So members get asked three questions instead. Is this the actual problem. Is it defined granularly enough to act on. What would have to be true for your solution to work. Getting through those takes weeks, and it is the whole point.
What it is not
- Not a case club.
- A case gives you the problem and grades the answer. Here the problem is the assignment, and finding out you had the wrong one is a good week, not a failed one.
- Not a consulting club.
- Members work on problems they chose, and in the spring they build the solution themselves rather than hand it over in a deck.
- Not major specific.
- Members come from engineering, finance, public policy, life sciences, and the humanities. A room of one major asks one kind of question.
The arc of the year
The fall is for exploring and pitching. Members bring problems weekly, the room pressure-tests them, and the weak ones fall away in public. Nobody is protecting an idea by keeping it vague.
By the end of the fall the club converges on one or two proposals and votes. Those become staffed teams and launch as real projects in the spring. One year, one or two things that actually exist at the end of it.
Don't just prepare for the future. Help build it.