Students involved in entrepreneurship at Berks will participate in the Penn State Student Entrepreneurship Summit on April 15, 2016, at University Park campus. The goal of the summit is to connect entrepreneurial students from across the Penn State campuses and to share best practices and lessons learned in the realm of student entrepreneurship.
Participants will include incoming Entrepreneurship Student Club Chair Darshay Collier, engineering major; and Nick Haring, Caleb Kitchen, and Josh Mullan, information sciences and technology majors.
The morning will include presentations from campuses on their respective entrepreneurial climates, mini-keynotes from startup founders on how they balance the student and entrepreneurial lifestyles, and an entrepreneurial “Fireside Chat” with key entrepreneurial administrators.
There will be two opportunities for invited students to speak and present. The first set of presentations is called "Campus Ecosystem Speed Pitches." One or two students from each campus will have six minutes to describe the entrepreneurship ecosystem at their respective campus. The second set of presentations is called "The Student Entrepreneur: Lessons Learned." This is an opportunity for student founders to walk the audience through the highs and lows of balancing the lifestyles of a student and of an entrepreneur.
Penn State Berks students attending the summit have submitted proposals to give presentations on the college ecosystem and to discuss their involvement in HackPSU.
In the ecosystem presentation, they will discuss the Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ENTI) Minor–New Venture Creation Cluster, offered at Penn State Berks and the many resources available to help young entrepreneurs succeed. The minor hosts a speaker series in which both entrepreneurs and executives of large corporations talk with students about their experiences and share their wisdom. They will also talk about the Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CEED) Center, which provides access to 3-D printers for students to prototype designs, as well as a wide variety of materials to help students learn about starting companies. Students also have many opportunities through the Entrepreneurship Student Club, which is open to all majors. This past fall, the club hosted an event for local high school students to learn about the business process. They will discuss the group of students who entered the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce Business Idea Challenge in Spring 2015 and won first place.
Then, Information Sciences and Technology (IST) students’ participation in HackPSU will be discussed. Through the IST major and the CEED Center, students were informed about and encouraged to attend the hackathon in Fall 2015, which was held at University Park. The Berks team was able to successfully build an application that allowed them to complete the COIL challenge. By doing so, they now have an opportunity to establish a business based on the application they developed. While they have not reached this stage yet, they are using the resources at Berks to gain as much information as they can about starting a company. Through collaboration with the professors at Berks, they have gained a lot of support and help with research and advice on steps to take to further their project.
The Penn State Student Entrepreneurship Summit is sponsored by Invent Penn State and Innoblue.