Eighteen months ago Eden Full was finishing up her sophomore year at Princeton University. She was on the crew team as a coxswain. She had spent the previous summer in Kenya building an innovative, low-cost contraption to make solar panels more efficient.
Full was glowingly successful — the kind of college student who ends up profiled in alumni magazines.
But Full had decided to drop out.
"There is this huge media hype around dropping out of college and what is the value of college. But I think college means different things to different people. And, you know, the reason college is quote, unquote 'overvalued' is because people don't know how to use it effectively," Full says.
Back then, that was Full's concern. She wasn't sure that she wanted to leave college forever, but she also wasn't sure she was getting the most out her time there.
And she had this itch. That contraption she built in Kenya to make solar panels more efficient — she called it the SunSaluter, and she was convinced it could have a big impact.
"The SunSaluter is kind of like, a sunflower. It follows the sun from east to west throughout the day, and that will give you up to 40 percent more electricity from your solar panel," Full says.
Full thought this idea could help bring affordable, sustainable electricity to the 1.5 billion people in the world who don't have it.
Full had more than an idea — she had a product. But she couldn't imagine building a business while she was a full-time student. So when she heard about the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, she applied.
Taking The Leap
Peter Thiel, who helped create PayPal and was Facebook's first major investor, has some unusual interests. He is deeply interested in private space exploration. He has invested in anti-aging research and has spent millions supporting Ron Paul's presidential bids.
But Thiel is perhaps best known for his insistence that higher education is overvalued in America.
Roughly two years ago, Thiel came up with the idea of offering 20 exceptional college-age students fellowships worth $100,000 if they would drop out of college and pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions instead.
When Full and the other Thiel fellows landed in the Bay Area in the fall of 2011, it was a pretty intense group. "Like, everyone thinks you only need to run on two hours of sleep, and if you are not running on two hours of sleep you're being lazy," Full says.
That didn't really work for Full. She realized that to do good work, it was important to have some balance — to try to be happy. She moved to a sunny spot in Oakland.
"Basically we build the SunSaluter out of an old firehouse. We call it the 'Firehome.' It's home to a lot of different startups. There is a nice little workspace downstairs and we all live upstairs," Full says.
Making The Most Of Time
There, she refined the SunSaluter. Now, a dripping water filtration system creates the weight that slowly moves the panel. The simple system gives villagers both more solar power and clean water.
"We want people to be able to maintain it themselves without having technical knowledge. The reason a lot of these kinds of technologies fail in the field is that they are simply too complicated. We want something that's really intuitive and easy to understand," Full says.
Her business now has a small staff, and she is confident it can sustain itself while she finishes her degree. Full has decided to go back to college, but she thinks the Thiel fellowship taught her how to get the most out of her time in school.
Full started off her college career in a hurry, but her advice to other students in a similar spot today is to slow down, take some time off and figure out what you really want to do.
"Then once you have gotten a taste of that, then go back to college when you are more mature and not so distracted and actually go and finish and make something of that experience. And it think it can be really rewarding and really meaningful," she says.
Most of the first class of Thiel fellows probably won't go back to college — at least not right now. But few of them are ruling it out completely.
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