By Jon Gorey
noteworthy
The room is abuzz with big ideas and pizza. It’s a July morning at the Suffolk University Center for Entrepreneurship at One Beacon Street, and 30-some high school students across seven tables are trying to come up with a new product line—either a racing bike or a passenger railcar—along with an attention-grabbing elevator pitch that sums up their idea in a succinct 60 seconds of sizzle.
“Bike people, who’s your target customer?” prompts Professor Shari Worthington, as she filters through the room. She reminds the groups that an interesting data point can reveal the urgency of the market demand for a given product. One group of students, reading a research report on their phones, cautiously ventures a well-received answer: “Um, the ‘4.5 million people who have started biking as their main cardio workout or to get to work in the last three years?’”
Nearby, a group working on trains brainstorms ways to improve the commuter experience. “What about a luxury car, with a Starbucks on the train?” one student suggests.
These rising high school seniors, from Boston, Lynn, and other nearby communities, are the inaugural participants in the Sawyer Business School’s new Summer Entrepreneurship Program. The three-week, intensive, college-level course called Becoming Entrepreneurial grants students three credits at no charge, and provides all required textbooks, an MBTA pass, and a free lunch each day.
Geared toward standout students who might be the first in their families to attend college, the program also includes lunchtime sessions with Suffolk’s career services and admissions teams on preparing for college and navigating financial aid.
“We’re hoping to help them see and experience firsthand what college is like,” Worthington says, “and hopefully encourage more of them to go, whether it’s at Suffolk or elsewhere.”
Generously funded for five years by banker and venture capitalist Spencer Lake, BSBA ’84, the program embodies Suffolk’s “pay it forward” mentality, Worthington adds. “We wanted to do something for kids from Boston who don’t necessarily have the same kind of access to resources that we might see in the suburbs.”
The idea is to get students to think more deeply about entrepreneurship, including how they “could take this knowledge back to their communities and use it as an economic engine,” says Professor Chaim Letwin, the Carol Sawyer Parks Endowed Chair and Suffolk’s director of entrepreneurship.
The course includes a site visit to LearnLaunch, an education-focused innovation lab and incubator in Boston, as well as a full slate of guest speakers, including alumni and local business people coming in “to meet and network with the students, and tell them about their entrepreneurial story,” Letwin says.
In addition to Lake, other guests include the restaurateur Eric Papachristos, BSBA ’98, MBA ’99, co-owner of Porto Boston and Saloniki, and Julia Rodgers, JD ’16, CEO and co-founder of HelloPrenup, an online legal service backed by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful).
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Photographs by Michael J. Clarke
| Fall 2022
On this particular morning, Worthington first delivers a lesson on the entrepreneurial method; the wall of the room is one gigantic whiteboard, and it soon looks like a subway station wall visited by a business-savvy graffiti artist. Students then listen raptly as Pariss Chandler, founder and CEO of the recruiting platform Black Tech Pipeline, describes the challenges, successes, and lessons she learned along her unconventional but rewarding path to entrepreneurship.
“Before you pay for something, make sure you can’t find it for free,” she suggests. “And don’t go to a venture capitalist unless you absolutely can’t move forward without one. If you can bootstrap your way to success, do that."
Letwin hopes the students come away from the program excited about college, but also thinking like entrepreneurs, regardless of what field they might enter. “The biggest misconception about entrepreneurship is that it’s only about starting a business,” Letwin says. “There’s so much more to it. It’s the way we think, the way we go about things, the toolkits and mindsets that we use when approaching problems.”
From finance to management to marketing, he adds, “the entrepreneurial mindset is used in every major.”
For their part, the students are embracing the opportunity. “It’s amazing,” says one student, Raihan Ahmed, who hopes to apply some of the concepts to an online business he is developing with a friend. “I had heard some of these terms before, but now it’s more in-depth,” he says, a spark of passion lighting up his eyes. ”Now it’s all making sense.”
The room is filled with big ideas and pizza. It’s a July morning at the Suffolk University Center for Entrepreneurship at One Beacon Street, and 30-some high school students across seven tables are trying to come up with a new product line—either a racing bike or a passenger railcar—along with an attention-grabbing elevator pitch that sums up their idea in a succinct 60 seconds of sizzle.
“Bike people, who’s your target customer?” prompts Professor Shari Worthington, as she filters through the room. She reminds the groups that an interesting data point can reveal the urgency of the market demand for a given product. One group of students, reading a research report on their phones, cautiously ventures a well-received answer: “Um, the ‘4.5 million people who have started biking as their main cardio workout or to get to work in the last three years?’”
Nearby, a group working on trains brainstorms ways to improve the commuter experience. “What about a luxury car, with a Starbucks on the train?” one student suggests.
These rising high school seniors, from Boston, Lynn, and other nearby communities, are the inaugural participants in Sawyer Business School’s new Summer Entrepreneurship Program. The three-week, intensive, college-level course called Becoming Entrepreneurial grants students three credits at no charge, and provides all required textbooks, an MBTA pass, and a free lunch each day.
Geared toward standout students who might be the first in their families to attend college, the program also includes lunchtime sessions with Suffolk’s career services and admissions teams on preparing for college and navigating financial aid.
“We’re hoping to help them see and experience firsthand what college is like,” Worthington says, “and hopefully encourage more of them to go, whether it’s at Suffolk or elsewhere.”
Generously funded for five years by banker and venture capitalist Spencer Lake, BSBA ’84, the program embodies Suffolk’s “pay it forward” mentality, Worthington adds. “We wanted to do something for kids from Boston who don’t necessarily have the same kind of access to resources that we might see in the suburbs.”
The idea is to get students to think more deeply about entrepreneurship, including how they “could take this knowledge back to their communities, and use it as an economic engine,” says Professor Chaim Letwin, the Carol Sawyer Parks Endowed Chair and Suffolk’s director of entrepreneurship.
The course includes a site visit to LearnLaunch, an education-focused innovation lab and incubator in Boston, as well as a full slate of guest speakers, including alumni and local business people coming in “to meet and network with the students, and tell them about their entrepreneurial story,” Letwin says. In addition to Lake, other guests include the restaurateur Eric Papachristos, BS ’98, MBA ’99, co-owner of Porto Boston and Saloniki, and Julia Rodgers, JD ’15, CEO and co-founder of HelloPrenup, an online legal service backed by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful).
The room is abuzz with big ideas and pizza. It’s a July morning at the Suffolk University Center for Entrepreneurship at One Beacon Street, and 30-some high school students across seven tables are trying to come up with a new product line—either a racing bike or a passenger railcar—along with an attention-grabbing elevator pitch that sums up their idea in a succinct 60 seconds of sizzle.
“Bike people, who’s your target customer?” prompts Professor Shari Worthington, as she filters through the room. She reminds the groups that an interesting data point can reveal the urgency of the market demand for a given product. One group of students, reading a research report on their phones, cautiously ventures a well-received answer: “Um, the ‘4.5 million people who have started biking as their main cardio workout or to get to work in the last three years?’”
Nearby, a group working on trains brainstorms ways to improve the commuter experience. “What about a luxury car, with a Starbucks on the train?” one student suggests.
These rising high school seniors, from Boston, Lynn, and other nearby communities, are the inaugural participants in the Sawyer Business School’s new Summer Entrepreneurship Program. The three-week, intensive, college-level course called Becoming Entrepreneurial grants students three credits at no charge, and provides all required textbooks, an MBTA pass, and a free lunch each day.
Geared toward standout students who might be the first in their families to attend college, the program also includes lunchtime sessions with Suffolk’s career services and admissions teams on preparing for college and navigating financial aid.
“We’re hoping to help them see and experience firsthand what college is like,” Worthington says, “and hopefully encourage more of them to go, whether it’s at Suffolk or elsewhere.”
Generously funded for five years by banker and venture capitalist Spencer Lake, BSBA ’84, the program embodies Suffolk’s “pay it forward” mentality, Worthington adds. “We wanted to do something for kids from Boston who don’t necessarily have the same kind of access to resources that we might see in the suburbs.”
The idea is to get students to think more deeply about entrepreneurship, including how they “could take this knowledge back to their communities and use it as an economic engine,” says Professor Chaim Letwin, the Carol Sawyer Parks Endowed Chair and Suffolk’s director of entrepreneurship.
The course includes a site visit to LearnLaunch, an education-focused innovation lab and incubator in Boston, as well as a full slate of guest speakers, including alumni and local business people coming in “to meet and network with the students, and tell them about their entrepreneurial story,” Letwin says.
In addition to Lake, other guests include the restaurateur Eric Papachristos, BSBA ’98, MBA ’99, co-owner of Porto Boston and Saloniki, and Julia Rodgers, JD ’16, CEO and co-founder of HelloPrenup, an online legal service backed by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful).
The Summer Entrepreneurship Program was championed by Sawyer Business School Dean Amy Zeng (left) and Assistant Dean Kim Larkin (fifth from left), and led by Professors Chaim Letwin (fourth from left) and Shari Worthington (sixth from left). Guest speakers included alumni entrepreneur Eric Papachristos (second from left) and Val Brooks, associate director of Junior Achievement (third from left).