James Barlow this fall joined the Hill as director of the Tufts Gordon Institute's (TGI) Entrepreneurial Leadership Program (ELP).
"He brings a really good perspective to the program," Entrepreneurial Leadership Studies Professor of the Practice John Hodgman said. "He has been all over the country and worked with schools [on issues of entrepreneurship education]. We look forward to having him work with us and build an even greater venue for our students."
Barlow succeeds Pamela Goldberg (J '77) as program director and will oversee the entrepreneurial leadership minor as well as serve as a liaison between Tufts students and the ELP advisory board.
"What attracted me to Tufts was the great diversity of the student body," Barlow said. "It's really exciting to join [these students] and show them that the best way to predict your own future is to create it yourself."
Barlow, also a senior lecturer at TGI, said he looks forward to engaging his students in innovative entrepreneurial exercises.
"Our students get to go out and build an ecosystem at Tufts," he said. "They'll be able show their peers what they're capable of building and striving towards."
Barlow, head of outreach at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), has taught in Canada, Thailand and Sweden and has given guest lectures and led leadership workshops at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among other universities.
After deciding to take a break from traveling to work on more long-term projects, Barlow applied and was accepted as the director of the ELP earlier this year.
"I've been running boot camp programs all around the world," Barlow said. "It was great to go out and do these shorter programs at schools, but I've missed being able to stay somewhere and develop something permanent. Doing a project for over a year, as I'll be doing here, always becomes a drawn-out process and starts becoming very cool."
The ELP was introduced in 2000 as an interdisciplinary program for undergraduates looking to develop their management skills through an entrepreneurial leadership minor. The program has since gone on to incorporate a lecture series, business planning competitions and entrepreneurial internships for students.
"The program has matured and continues to be very popular," TGI Director Robert Hannemann said. "We have 500 registered students for the school year, and 65 students completed the minor at our last graduation."
Hodgman commented on the value of the ELP to the Tufts community.
"It's a very high quality program that can serve the needs of students going further," he said.
The ELP looks to join efforts with the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO), according to Hannemann. The collaboration will give entrepreneurial leadership students the opportunity to share the value of engineering with younger students in the Medford/Somerville area.
"We're talking seriously about a partnership with CEEO, as we're focused on new ways to teach our engineering students and to include more cross-disciplinary areas of study [in our program]," he said. "We're still in the very early stages of that partnership, but we're already making progress towards it."
Hannemann expressed optimism about the future of the ELP with Barlow at the helm.
"We're excited about moving our program forward," he said. "We think we provide a unique value for a Tufts education to many students, and we're enthusiastic about developing the program further."
