Tufts has in the past few years seen a boom in the amount of startups that its students and alums create, whether with computer science skills or otherwise. As a university, Tufts does not have a long- held reputation for producing a great number of entrepreneurs or startups akin to that of MIT or Stanford. Still, the campus has a number of alums who have taken the skills they learned at Tufts into the startup world. Even some students have taken to the entrepreneurial life from their dorm rooms. Though it is not traditionally fertile ground for startups, Tufts should use its unique traits to bolster its future entrepreneurs by emphasizing its international focus and reaching out to its alumni who work in finance. Doing so not only strengthens one more facet of our curriculum, but also increases students chances in a difficult jobs market.
As a university, Tufts has produced entrepeneurs like Kevin Halter (A 03), founder of Getabale, an app, and Neil Blumenthal (A 02) founder of Warby Parker, a vintage prescription glasses store. The two serve as examples of the type of people and enterprises Tufts can produce. Certainly, there are some immediately evident actions that can be taken to continue building up this part of our academic programs. Computer science, a major growing in popularity on campus, could see crossover classes with Entrepreneurial Leadership Studies (ELS) to examine the crossroads of technology and business. Tufts Venture Fund has put focus on the capacity of Tufts to use its international and global focus to inform its entrepreneurial-minded students in a way that makes them able to think differently and compete more intensely. At another side of the entrepreneurial equation lies the financial support expressly important to nascent startup companies. Tufts has a large alumni community in finance and many students interested in financial futures. Whether by supporting the crossing of these two focuses in academics or in internships and programs, the administration can use available resources to round out entrepreneurial students in potent ways.
Tufts has a great deal of potential to be a great school for students interested in starting a company or major project. The universitys global focus and international emphasis as well as its diversity of student interests serve to make its average student, and therein its average entrepreneur, that much more worldly and socially conscious. Being able to produce entrepreneurial students not only takes advantage of an era in which the government is desperate to stimulate business in the United States, but also equips Jumbos with the skills they need to make their dreams and passions come to life. Boosting our startups and entrepreneurial students is a venture that the administration has great reason to engage in. Doing so is the all-important, and elusive, next step.
