Great Opportunity Right Here

The snow kept falling outside, nearing eight inches, and still they came. Today was the first day of the Tuck mini-course "Introduction to Entrepreneurship," headed by Gregg Fairbanks (Executive Director, DEN), Aaron Kaplan (interventional cardiologist, DHMC), and Michael Clarkin (President, Trilogy Consulting).

I'm taking the nine-week course, which is open to all Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff, as part of my research on entrepreneurship at Dartmouth for the engineering school magazine - and also, simply, because I thought it'd be fun. A lot of people had the same idea. The course, which originally was slated for 60 spots, had to be split into two sections because over 150 people signed up.

At first when I showed up in the Shapiro classroom I thought I would be the only woman, but soon the room started to fill up, and there was a great mix of people. There were Tuckies (who carried with them their laptops and personal name signs to display), medical researchers, engineers, and more. The Tuckies being Tuckies were the first to speak up about what they felt entrepreneurship was all about, but soon other people started to chime in. It was kind of cool, like being back at Stanford.

In the first half of this week's class, Gregg Fairbanks gave an overview of the course. He addressed the reading assignments - the main text is Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start - and class requirements. Those taking the class for credit are required to form teams and prepare a pitch presentation to visiting "investors" at the end of the course. Students with ideas will give a mini-pitch next week and the rest of the class can volunteer to work on their teams.

In the second half, Aaron Kaplan gave a mock pitch presentation on a medical device. After his pitch, the class acted as partners of an investment group and discussed whether they should accept his proposal. We also picked apart the presentation itself, listing things that were effective or of concern.

I'm kind of psyched and definitely want to try to volunteer for a group next week. What's also neat is that I actually know a couple of people in the class - and they're actually two non-Tuck people. Both women work for the Dartmouth Medical School in their development office. We met at a Christmas party before break and had actually planned to get together for lunch on Friday. We didn't realize that we were all taking this class.

I'll be sure to share my notes on each class right here.