Students from Bowdoin, Bates and Colby learn about entrepreneurship in intensive startup workshop

60 students from three different liberal arts colleges recently took part in the 2-day Startup Experience workshop hosted at the brand new co-working space Cloudport in Portland. The students had all applied to participate in the workshop and the room was buzzing with excitement when Henrik Scheel from Startup Experience kicked off the workshop Saturday morning.

The students quickly realized that this was not going to be a quiet weekend but rather two days full of creativity, business modeling and intensive teamwork. Shortly after kickoff the students formed 10 new startup teams and began their entrepreneurial journey including; searching for a relevant problem to solve, understanding the customer segment, generating ideas using ideation techniques, developing a business model, testing the business model with customers and finally practicing and delivering a professional business pitch at the end of the second day.

Most of the students had never been to an entrepreneurship event before so there was a lot of new information and an entirely different approach to problem solving to be learned. “Taking part in the Startup Experience workshop was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, I learned more here in a weekend than I usually do in an entire semester” said one of the students.

Most people don’t think of entrepreneurship when they think of liberal arts colleges but it turns out that entrepreneurship can be a fantastic vehicle to bring your ideas to reality. Entrepreneurs are problem solvers who are good at turning complex problems into exciting opportunities, and that is a mindset that is very well aligned with the fundamentals in a liberal arts education and many students therefore find entrepreneurship very appealing.

Taking part in a startup workshop like Startup Experience can be a great introduction to the entrepreneurial mindset and give students an authentic experience of what it means to work in a startup company.

Among the students attending was Kevin Ma ’17 from Bowdoin. “The Startup Experience deconstructed and de-mystified the idea of entrepreneurship,” he said. “In fact, it really made the idea of starting my own business exciting and enticing. Maybe I’ll work on my startup idea after graduation!”

Article from local news papers here and here