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!