1 Semester Startup at the University of Texas is breaking new ground in teaching the art and science of entrepreneurship.  I am very much looking forward to assisting as a mentor this semester.  The students, nearly all undergrads, are actually on missions to create real companies; it’s a bona fide lab course and not just theory.  I think it’s especially cool that mentors are asked not to invest in the companies – at least until after the semester!

All this brings to mind fond memories of my one semester of teaching a graduate level MBA entrepreneurship course at the Goizueta School at Emory University in Atlanta.  I had previously and have since given many talks to various classes at Emory, GA State, and GA Tech, but actually having grade power put a whole new perspective on the process.  I was told that I was lucky to have graduate students.  The professor who recruited me said that undergrads were so grade sensitive in their planning for future graduate programs and jobs that when he gave out anything below an A he generally had to talk to Mama, Daddy, and a few uncles about how a life-long star-student in a prestigious (and expensive) university could possibly fall short of an A.

I do not count this as one of the successes in my life.  I probably learned more than the students did, and I think I connected with some, but here’s how it went.  I was given a syllabus under which the students were to form teams at the beginning and come up with business plans for presentation and defense in the classroom setting.  A few weeks were allotted for that, followed by some actual instruction.  I was told the order could not be reversed because the student workloads got too heavy from mid-terms and beyond.

So, the prescribed structure called for students to come up with really bad ideas on a subject where they had no training, and then spend the rest of the semester undoing the damage.  There were no mentors, per se, although I did bring in some worthy guest speakers.  

The class was an elective, and I questioned the sincerity of interest of most of the students.  I had people from F500 companies, several nations, and multiple backgrounds that showed no traces of entrepreneurial leanings and were probably looking just for a load-lightening course.  One international student who had limited command of English always sat on the front row and went to sleep immediately.   I did say most, not all, and there were some in the class who belonged there for the right reasons and who did participate enthusiastically.

Early on I discovered that all these students could write business prose very well.   Rather than read the same BS over and over again, I switched the goals to getting the concepts right in simple PPT decks and spending their hours on thinking rather than spewing out the words of more elaborate business plans.

So, with nothing really at stake, and with at least one team copying a plan from a previous semester (to my knowledge), we went through the process.  That was some number of years ago, and I don’t recall a single one of the plans that were put forward.   Not all were high-tech for sure.   I graded the students against each other as best I could in compliance with the distribution prescribed by the department.  I didn’t have to talk to any parents, but I know a few of the students could not discern any correlation between their actual grades and the syllabus. 

That course was only offered in the fall semester, and I chose not to repeat it again the next year.  The effort that would have been required to revamp it for my style far exceeded the compensation and the “psychic income.”  Then too the university was trying to minimize the use of adjunct professors like me because of negative consequence on national rankings.  Even the person who recruited me, also an adjunct, moved on to a prominent position at UVA.

The Goizueta Business School at Emory is one of the best in the nation, and I would certainly commend any person who choses to go there.  My criticisms are limited to my being miscast as a professor for one course at one point in time.

But, all this goes strongly to the point that 1SS is a much more practical model, designed and implemented by the professors who are leading it, with plenty of tech community support in Austin, and populated with students who are genuinely eager to be in the class.  I’m sure the goal is not to run the undergrads out of school to start up ventures before getting their degrees (might hear from Mama on that), but I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens occasionally.  Certainly some ideas will get further incubated while students remain in school and will then be hatched upon graduation in lieu of job seeking.

And, I do remember vividly the Chancellor’s introduction of Michael Dell as the principal speaker at my son’s UT graduation:  “He’s done rather well, but just think how far he might have gotten if he had completed his degree like all of you have.”

<photo: Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off>