Courtesy of the Bates Center for Entrepreneurship and Leadership
Three Lewis & Clark students will represent the college at InventOR Bootcamp, a state-wide prototyping competition this summer offering $30,000 in cash prizes. This comes after winning first place in the 2025 five-day Winterim pitch competition — an immersive entrepreneurial program hosted by the Bates Center for Entrepreneurship and Leadership each year during winter break.
In mid-January, over 60 professionals served as speakers, mentors and judges for the 30 students who participated in Winterim. Cash prizes were awarded for four categories: first and second place teams, best understanding of the problem and audience choice award.
Victor Cho ’26, Melanie Gitiha ’27 and Alvina Sargsyan ’25 were randomly placed in a group, and after five days of intensive collaboration and design, the trio emerged as this year’s victors. The team won first place and Best Physical Product with their prototype and vision for Sunshine Windows — a full-spectrum LED light strip designed to be installed around windows, simulating sunlight for users as they wake up.
Their success in January qualified them for 2025’s InventOR Collegiate Challenge, which begins with an InventOR Bootcamp hosted at Portland State University May 2-4, designed to prepare them for the prototyping competition through more mentorship, speakers and workshops. They will then head to the finals from June 26-27 at the University of Portland to pitch their product to an independent committee of judges alongside other competitors from around the state.
Chrys Hutchings, managing director for the Bates Center for Entrepreneurship and Leadership, highlighted the opportunities afforded to students by the Winterim intensive entrepreneurship program in an email statement to The Mossy Log.
“Winterim’s pitch isn’t just a business pitch, but a platform to persuade industry experts that the team has the drive as well as the collaborative ability to execute,” Hutchings said. “InventOR has them competing with schools ten times larger than ours, but Lewis & Clark has won before.”
Back in 2020, Ramez Attia ’21 and Matthew Brown ’21 won $12,000 at the InventOR competition for their product SafeStart, a device that seeks to prevent DUIs by directly disabling the car’s ignition if unsafe amounts of alcohol are detected. After winning the cash prize, they got to work on a second prototype, which involved an app with facial recognition software to present false positives and included a “best friends list” to call for safe, alternative rides.
Hutchings emphasized the talent and motivation of this year’s team.
“This is a stellar team,” Hutchings said. “They started the Winterim week with a crash course in design thinking, and that as well as their many mentors and tenacity carried them through to the pitch competition. We support them and are available as a resource to connect them to people they should talk to. But at the end of the day, it is really all up to them.”
Cho, who studies economics, joined Winterim after a friend recommended it. Cho said that, as someone with a background in predominantly male-dominated spaces, such as football and the army, Winterim was a valuable experience that allowed him to connect with and work alongside new people.
“You had to get to know each other and make a prototype and present in five days,” Cho said. “The class of Winterim I took made me a different person. It was pretty hard to get used to the college life again after military experience. Winterim taught me networking, and how to talk to people, you know, communicating to each other. That class changed my life, for sure.”
Cho expressed excitement to continue working on the prototype to present to the judges at the competition in June.
“You just gotta wonder, keep wondering, ‘What can I make better? What can I make easier or better for humanity?’” Cho said.
Gitiha, a rhetoric and media studies major, recalled the stress of deciding on a final product to present to the judges on Friday morning, the final day of Winterim.
“We went through a bunch of different ideas and it felt like we were never gonna land on anything, but Thursday night we got it all together, Friday morning we got a prototype working — Victor did a lot of work with the prototype — and we really bonded as a team,” she said.
Gihita emphasized the value of this product for consumers in Portland, which only gets about150 days of sunshine per year.
“It’s this installable light strip that would go around your windows and connect with a partner app, so you can program it to start rising before your alarm comes on, so that you can wake up to simulated sunlight in your room rather than waking up in the dark,” Gihita said. “It can help with your circadian rhythm.”
Sargsyan described Winterim as an intense but professionally and intellectually rewarding experience that required collaborative team conversations.
“I had never met my team members before Winterim. We had to learn to work together in a fast-paced environment. At times it was hard, we would disagree on things, but we always found ways to resolve our disagreements,” Sargsyan said.
Sargsyan looks forward to discussing Sunshine Windows further with innovative experts.
“I am excited about InventOR,” she said. “I look forward to meeting experts and discussing our product with them. I think it has a lot of potential and InventOR will give us the right resources to advance our product. Our product is so valuable because it helps people start their days with light even when it is dark outside. Because who likes to wake up in the dark?”
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