Through a range of new initiatives, the Entrepreneurship Club at Yale School of Management (SOM) is focused on involving the entire SOM community in making it easier for students to start new enterprises.
“The level of support here is amazing,” said Brian Murray ’10. Murray spearheaded the creation of a new website to provide a focal point for entrepreneurship at the school. Called Entrepreneurship@SOM, the site is intended to help keep the SOM community abreast of all the entrepreneurial projects its members are working on.
“You think you know everyone who is doing something, but then it seems like just about every day you hear about something else a student is doing,” Murray said. He himself is working to launch a real estate venture to help develop more environmentally friendly multifamily housing for low income people.
The Entrepreneurship Club also has supported the development of a new group in the past year called Those Interested in Entrepreneurship, or TIE. Several faculty, meanwhile, have helped students form an informal entrepreneurship network. And at the alumni level, an online portal has become home to a range of Virtual Interest Groups (VIGs), hubs formed around specific topics where alumni and students can exchange ideas, network and start new ventures.
Current VIGs focus on consulting, CSR, healthcare, and media and entertainment, and Murray is working now to create the Venture Capital & Entrepreneurship VIG.
Jeanne Hayes, director of the Office of Alumni Relations, praises the alumni portal for helping strengthen the connection between alumni and current students. “When you join a VIG, you know that your affinity with other members is reinforced by the shared experience of belonging to the Yale SOM community,” she said.
Murray, for his part, is excited by the surge of entrepreneurship that is taking place at Yale SOM right now. “There’s a feeling that a lot of things are coming together at once,” he said. “It’s really important for those of us who came to school looking to become entrepreneurs. We want it to be one of the pillars SOM stands on.”
For more on entrepreneurship at Yale SOM, click here.
