What colleges have startup mentality?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875941

by alex_g • 14 years ago

8 19 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a junior in high school, looking at colleges. I know Stanford would be #1 in startup mentality, but I'm looking for some more. I'd rather look at a list of colleges with top startup mentality than the USNews College rankings.

Note: By startup mentality, I mean colleges where the school and a decent amount of the student body is accepting of the entrepreneurial mindset and fosters the Silicon Valley culture (even if it isn't in Silicon Valley).

flom2• 14 years ago

I can't speak for other schools, but the University of Maryland is working hard to become a "startup school." A few examples:

At least five professors in our electrical engineering department have companies.

The business school has successful entrepreneurs that can meet with students (in any major) trying to start companies.

There's a whole institute at the university called MTECH which has successful entrepreneurs and investors who help startups get off the ground. They have office hours once a month so if you impress them they can help introduce you to the right people.

thetabyte• 14 years ago

I'm going into UMD, majoring in Computer Science, in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Honors College next year. Any recommendations for someone interested in getting into the startup scene at Maryland? I'm probably going to apply for Hinman CEOs for junior/senior year, and I've been researching MTech and the Tech Entrepreneurship minor.

flom2• 14 years ago

My advice would be to network with other students interested in startups, and build stuff with them. Twice a semester, there is a business pitch competition called "Pitch Dingman," and there's an annual business plan competition through MTECH. Make it a goal to enter them at some point with friends you make! You'll learn a lot in the process and meet other aspiring entrepreneurs. The Pitch Dingman events are open to the public, so I'd encourage you to check them out and see what UMD entrepreneurs are up to.

aorshan• 14 years ago

As painful as it is for me to say this, the University of Miami isn't very startupy. We have a really great office on campus called the launchpad to help students start companies, but I haven't seen a single tech company come out of there. Most of our CS department is very theoretical and research oriented. However our ACM is pretty cool and we just had our first hackathon a few weeks ago. It was sponsored by twillio, microsoft, mongoDB, sendgrid, and a few other companies.

JayNeely• 14 years ago

Babson and Olin are two schools in Boston with a big focus on entrepreneurship. Babson is more business-focused, Olin more engineering-focused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babson_College

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_College

I also see a lot of students from Northeastern University at startup events here, and hear nothing but good things about their Co-Op program, where internships with companies (including startups) are part of your degree program:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_University

dm8• 14 years ago

Berkeley for sure! And it has a vibrant open source community too.

grizzlylazer• 14 years ago

I can second this as a Cal student. We've got a lot of talented engineers working on startups all the time.

alex_g3• 14 years ago

Any you can share? :)

csdual• 14 years ago

University of Utah is very close to MIT in the number of tech startups spun off of university research, and surpassed them in 2009:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110301/how-the-university-of-u...

alex_g3• 14 years ago

I was surprised by this one! But I looked into it and it seems legit. Do you know anything about the computer science program? I checked out the courses and they seemed interesting, although many of the neat ones were for graduate students only :(

blcArmadillo• 14 years ago

The University of Michigan has a strong startup mentality which gets stronger and stronger by the day. Michigan has had a Center for Entrepreneurship for I believe roughly 8 years now. They've just partnered with the business school to start a Masters in Entrepreneurship in addition to the certificate program they currently have. They also have many other services such as a mentor network for people working on or looking to start a startup as well as TechArb which provide student startups with office space. And all these services are of course free as a student. I'd definitive encourage you to check them out.

acoyfellow• 14 years ago

Absolutely not Cabrini College (Radnor, PA)

Mz2• 14 years ago

As a guess, any of the universities associated with a National Lab would likely be startup friendly. This might be part of what makes Berkeley startup friendly. National Labs develop a lot of tech which then gets used to start new businesses. They also do internships, or did at one time. I applied and got as far as the initial interview. Last I checked, I had the impression they still do internships but the name of the program had changed.

mchannon2• 14 years ago

Couldn't disagree more, but this is probably because of my exposure to different national labs. Proximity to LBL or LLNL may be a help, but the real help comes from the larger community and the schools themselves. Most of the other national labs don't have the startup-friendly communities to back them up.

National labs are great at coming up with new technologies. They are absolutely horrid at commercializing them, which is caused mostly by heavy-handed government policies.

Mz2• 14 years ago

Please elaborate on your exposure to different labs for the benefit of the OP.

Thanks.

reledi• 14 years ago

No one has mentioned Canada yet, so I'll attempt to cover that.

I attend Brock University in Southern Ontario. There's not much startup mentality here but it's increasing. A business incubator was recently founded [1]. From the tech side, I'm usually the one encouraging the startup mentality (with a few friends). For example, we organized the school's first hackathon last semester. Some of our graduates have created startups, but I'm not aware of any tech startups. Sometimes startups do recruiting here but not often.

Some of the schools I would recommend in Canada are University of Waterloo and University of Toronto. Both of those have a strong startup mentality. Incubators at both schools, lots of successful tech startups from both, and their locations are great for recruiting talent.

[1] http://www.busu.net/blueprint

jiganti• 14 years ago

You could go to the University of San Francisco - they have an Entrepreneurship program (essentially a BA with startup-related requirements). The great thing is that you'll be a short bus ride from a ton of startup stuff if you're willing to seek it out. That's why I chose here and don't regret it at all.

What colleges have startup mentality?

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