Reasons why students make great entrepreneurs. No kids, no spouses, no damned mortgages and not being burned out with life should surely help too. Robin is a (recently graduated) student entrepreneur. Are there more? Should almost all college courses teach entrepreneurial skills?
Damien Mulley
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lol…. thanks.
We did ‘New Enterprise Development’ but I sat through it thinking it was really just all common sense. Can you actually be taught ‘entrepreneurial skills’?
Common sense varies widly from person to person. I’m not sure can you be taught to be an entrepreneur but I’m sure it can be awakened in those that have the talent and it can be polished for those that have it. I think it classic examples of good ways to do thing and bad ways are a start. I have seem some classes on other topics where they almost get out a formulas and acronyms to describe how to do things. I don’t think that’s work.
Basic business skills / information should be obligatory modules for all 3rd level courses.
I don’t think you can be taught to be an entrepreneur. Many students I have taught during the past decade would not invest the energy required to nurse a product to market. They would work on a team and offer innovative approaches to solving problems but when it comes down to stepping off the consumer treadmill, abstaining from normal Bank Holiday short breaks, and using their personal money to satisfy a bank manager’s demand for a personal guarantee, they don’t have what it takes to connect the dots.
I took as many entrepreneurial courses during my graduate work as I possibly could.
Though entrepreneurism itself is difficult to teach, one way these courses help is to put you in touch with other like-minded folks. It’s also helpful to hear first hand from others that have taken the leap and succeeded (or failed).
[…] If he didn’t already have a great gig with Reuters lined up in London, clued-in employers would be scrambling to lure Robin Blandford, developer of CommentCasting, who has received a First Class Honours degree in Digital Media Engineering. Damien Mulley lists the advantages students like Robin have over the rest of us entrepreneurs – “No kids, no spouses, no damned mortgages and not being burned out with life should surely help too”. […]
Our course (Trinity Computer Science BA) dallied with entrepreneurial skills in third year this year. It was, quite frankly, a bit of a waste of time, and I’m certainly glad we won’t be doing it next year. This isn’t really the sort of thing you can teach, and in any case it isn’t a very university subject. It’s also something that the vast majority of college graduates will never go near.
You know, up until relatively recently, Latin was mandatory in universities…
I can’t recall who blogged about it, but it’s been said that for business courses and entreprenurial classes, surely those teaching them have to be people who built or were in successful companies. Academics are probably not the best people to tell you how to run a business if they’ve never been in one themselves as like so many in this comment thread have said, you can’t really hand out a formula on how to be successful.