For all of the efforts put in place to encourage entrepreneurship on campus, the University is still not what one would consider an “entrepreneurial” school. There are certainly successful entrepreneurs who are Princeton graduates, but the University is “not leading in number of successful startups.” There is a reasonable number of Princeton students who use startup experience during college as a springboard for corporate jobs or who pursue entrepreneurship as an extracurricular activity, but very few who actually choose to commit to entrepreneurship in the long run.
There are many initiatives aiming to get the University there — entrepreneurship-centric EGR classes, competitions held by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, as well as Keller Center efforts such as the new Entrepreneurial Hub. The goal, as a report by the Princeton Entrepreneurship Advisory Committee states, is to “contribute to the common good through entrepreneurial service,” “train character in areas of taking risk,” and “broaden the range of career choices for students.” However, some of these initiatives do not facilitate entrepreneurship as intended because students are, on the whole, not fully committed. Instead, many students use these resources as a résumé decorator rather than as a precursor to long-term entrepreneurship. Perhaps by recognizing this discrepancy, we can reformulate some of these initiatives to better carry out their intended effects.
One example of an initiative to promote entrepreneurship is the Princeton Pitch competition, during which students can earn $3,500 total in awards for developing and presenting a novel idea before a panel of judges. Having an actual product is preferred but not at all necessary in order to win. Pitch contests could be said to encourage idea generation, but they also incentivize idea over action. Without motivation to actually carry out the pitch idea, there is no result. Instead, most students walk away with money and a new accolade to put on their resumes, but very few, if any at all, take their idea to the actual development stage. A similar example is Idea Farm, a pitch competition sponsored by Microsoft and organized by the Undergraduate Student Government and the Keller Center, which also rewards the idea itself over the execution.
Another area that could benefit from an execution-focused component are the EGR entrepreneurship courses. A prominent one that the Princeton Entrepreneurship Advisory Committee report refers to is EGR 491: High Tech Entrepreneurship, which has educated “1,700 Princeton students about entrepreneurship during more than 30 semesters.” The PEAC report also states that “many students have cited these courses as transformative in their Princeton experience.” It may be that the class is considered transformative for students’ perspectives or views of entrepreneurship, but without a complementary course that teaches students to put those new views into practice, there is no result. These classes may simply produce students who know about entrepreneurship, but would not participate in it themselves.
That is not to say these EGR classes are not useful — they are absolutely vital to facilitating entrepreneurial thought. However, they should also be complemented with more classes that teach execution. Although not explicitly listed as an entrepreneurship course, COS 333: Advanced Programming Techniques, is a step in the right direction. COS 333 requires students to form teams, formulate an idea for a project and then execute that project with guidance from TAs and the professor, Brian Kernighan GS ’69, within a semester. The course ultimately produces students who possess actual knowledge of how to own and create a working project from beginning to end. Since the PEAC report also states that 28 percent of students cite lack of time due to academics as a reason for refraining from undertaking entrepreneurial projects, project-based classes could address that issue as well.
I believe the key missing component in the PEAC report’s goals is the “train character in areas of taking risk” component of its curriculum. Princeton students, in line with commonplace stereotypes, are considered relatively risk-averse, as evidenced by the abundance of “prestigious” jobs among graduates. However, that may be a feedback loop because they rarely see examples of others taking risks after graduation, making it less likely for them to take risks themselves. One way to fix this feedback loop could be to encourage risk taking in a “safe” environment — such as more project-based classes — so that students can slowly become comfortable with the concept of entrepreneurship.
By encouraging execution over idea generation, students can learn to build things and see them fail — and then repeat over and over again. This way they can develop coding or hardware skills, perseverance, and grit — attributes necessary for entrepreneurial success. Especially in a school setting, where failure is not actual monetary or professional failure, it can be valuable to have more execution-based classes like COS 333, or execution-based competitions like HackPrinceton — and less glorification of the ideas themselves.
Barbara Zhan is an operations research and financial engineering major from Plainsboro, N.J. She can be reached at barbaraz@princeton.edu.
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