A jumpstart for entrepreneurs
Intensive course helps students navigate early challenges in starting a company.
There are myriad challenges for entrepreneurs when first starting a company: fundraising, recruiting talent, developing an innovative product, networking, scaling, and — not least of all — finding customers.
StartMIT, a course offered during MIT’s Independent Activities Period between semesters, aims to help engineering students navigate those early challenges, with advice from founders who have been through it all. The course is co-organized by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the MIT Innovation Initiative.
StartMIT: IAP for Entrepreneurs
Like with anything else, it helps to learn from the best
IAP (Independent Activities Period) is a really neat time at MIT, because you get to see where all the creative energy of the student body goes when it’s not tied up doing psets. A lot of people participate in hackathons like MakeMIT and programming competitions like Battlecode. Or they trade in courses in physics and math for wonky classes like “Science of Cooking” and “How to Make a Bike”. Or those who want to explore a new field may take on a full-time research project.
But for a lot of students, their energy takes an entrepreneurial bent.
That’s why MIT began StartMIT—an intensive entrepreneurship workshop that runs over IAP, open to any member of the MIT community at any stage in the process of of starting a company–really. My current stage of starting a company could best be described as “enthusiastic interest”, so I submitted a proposal with only modest hopes of being accepted. To my surprise, I got in, and I signed myself up!
Empowering innovation
Panel highlighting female innovators from a range of fields aims to encourage student entrepreneurs.
An all-star panel of entrepreneurs shared their experiences as part of the evolving innovation ecosystem at “Empowering Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” the capstone event of StartMIT, an Independent Activities Period class aimed at exposing students to the elements of entrepreneurship.
Moderated by Jesse Draper, creator and host of the Emmy-nominated “Valley Girl Show,” the all-female panel included Susan Hockfield, president emerita of MIT; Helen Greiner ’89, SM ’90, CEO and founder of CyPhy Works and co-founder of iRobot; Payal Kadakia ‘05, CEO and co-founder of ClassPass; and Dina Katabi, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT.