Coming Up in Entrepreneurship – Sept & Oct 2021

Here’s what’s coming up in entrepreneurship:

Events

 

DSI Race + Data Science Lecture Series (Multiple Dates): The DSI Race + Data Science Lecture Series celebrates and advances research in the areas of race and data, engineering, and computational science. Our goal is to improve how we as data scientists and data-adjacent researchers speak about race. We envision that these talks may lead to the discovery of important resources about race, inequity, and emerging applications. Registration is open for our Fall 2021 series; learn more about dates, speakers, and talks here.

 

Athena Entrepreneurs (Every Thursday): Drop by the Athena Entrepreneurs meetup on Thursday, September 23, 6:30 to 8 PM at the Athena Center, Milstein 4th Floor to get to know other students interested in entrepreneurship and learn more about how you can embrace positive risk-taking as an entrepreneur. We welcome all women and non-binary aspiring and emerging entrepreneurs at Barnard and Columbia. Come work on your startup – or just explore your interest in entrepreneurship with us. We’re joined by visiting experts nearly every week. No RSVP is required! Learn more about Athena Entrepreneurs at athenacenter.barnard.edu/eship.

 

CORE Town Hall (Sept 13 @ 9PM Virtually, Sept 14 @ 9pm Virtually, Sept 17 2-5pm in Person): Learn more about CORE, the Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs. This student club aims to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs at Columbia and Barnard through student-led programs, events, and initiatives. Applications to join CORE will go live after the Tuesday Town Hall.

 

CTech Info Session (Sept 16): CTech is a selective, cross-disciplinary program open to second-year MBA students with technical backgrounds and Engineering graduate students who are dedicated to launching and growing a tech or tech-driven startup while at Columbia.

 

Design Studio Open House (Sept 20): Columbia Entrepreneurship’s Design Studio is a physical space located in Room 430 of Riverside Church that amplifies Columbia’s creative potential to solve problems through design. Join for an open house of Columbia Entrepreneurship’s Design Studio on Monday, September 20 between 3:00-5:00pm. See the space, mingle with our designers, and chat with fellow students. This open house is for students ONLY! Masks are required and the capacity for this event will be 40. RSVP needed to attend.

 

Third Thursday (Sept 23): Kicking off the new semester, Columbia Engineering is kicking off its first Third Thursday of the 2021-2022 school year where you can mix and mingle with new, current and alumni entrepreneurs.

 

NYC Media Lab Summit 2021: Future Imperfect (Oct 6-7): This two-day online conference will once again bring together 1,000+ virtual attendees from NYC Media Lab’s core community—including executives, university faculty, students, investors, and entrepreneurs—to explore the future of media and tech in New York City and beyond.

 

SPARK with Kaylin Marcotte ’12Barnard: Supporting Women Through Entrepreneurship (Oct 12): How do you turn a hobby into a business? And how can that business lift up other women? Join this conversation with Barnard alumna and entrepreneur Kaylin Marcotte ’12Barnard. Kaylin is the founder & CEO of JIGGY, a direct-to-consumer jigsaw puzzle brand on a mission to modernize and elevate the humble jigsaw, and support female artists around the world. This SPARK will be in person for Barnard students/faculty/staff, virtual for alums, and members of the public. Learn more about SPARK here.

 

Third Thursday (Oct 21): Join Columbia Engineering Entrepreneurship for Third Thursday, an open forum networking and info session to hear ideas from across campus, meet guest speakers, form teams, and explore career options.

 

Start Me Up Bootcamp (Oct 21): Join Columbia Engineering’s Start Me Up Bootcamp, a virtual course to test your idea in the market! Participants in this free, two-week course will receive entrepreneurship training and mentor support as they virtually talk with customers to identify the best product-market fit using the lean launchpad methodology. Faculty, staff, postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate student researchers may apply with a team of one to three people. Applicants are expected to be available for all short-course sessions from October 21- November 5. Teams that successfully complete this bootcamp may become eligible to apply for the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Teams program, which includes a $50,000 grant. Application Deadline: rolling; first come, first serve.

 

Deadlines

 

SIPA Dean’s Public Policy Challenge Grant Program (Sept 27): The program, which is part of the campus-wide Columbia Venture Competition, invites students to turn their policy passions into entrepreneurial ventures – whether for profit or not for profit – and to design cutting-edge projects or prototypes that use ICT and/or data analytics to advance a public policy objective. Students across CU can apply, as long as they have at least 1 SIPA member.

 

Columbia-CareOne Healthcare Innovation Challenge, $25K Prize (Oct 1): America is seeing unprecedented innovations in healthcare technology, care delivery, andservices, but complexities are growing too, driven by the aging-of-America, inequality, politicized policy, pandemics, and retail healthcare. Calling All Healthcare Innovators and Entrepreneurs. Startups and/or teams developing IP with commercial potential accepted. This challenge focuses on the non-regulated healthcare space (no pharma or class three devices, please). Eligible examples include: Healthcare Delivery and Services, Diagnostics, Memory Loss, Class 1 and 2 Medical Devices, Telemedicine, Substance and Medication Management, Education, Public Health, and Age-in-Place solutions. More examples HERE.

 

Lang Fund: Columbia Business School Alumni Founders Application (Info Session Oct 1 at 12pm, Deadline Oct 5): The Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurial Initiative Fund (“The Lang Fund”) is opening up its fall selection process for early-stage, CBS alumni-founded startups. Winning companies typically receive $25-$50k investments.

 

CTV Fellows (Oct 1):Columbia Technology Ventures (CTV), Columbia’s technology transfer office, will be hiring graduate students and post-docs for the Fellows Program. It is a unique internship opportunity that introduces scientists to technology commercialization. We will host two virtual information sessions: one on Sept 14th at 10am and the other on Sept 15 at 5:30.  Please check the CTV website for the meeting information if the provided links do not work.  This is a paid position $25/hour for up to 10hrs/week. The application (due Oct 1) can be found here: https://ctvfellows.smapply.io/

Almaworks (Oct 4): Working on a startup? Almaworks helps early-stage Columbia affiliated startups achieve significant, sustainable growth. We offer cohort companies a unique set of value-adds including world-class mentorship, access to VCs and investors, corporate perks, discounted legal access and more. Almaworks has graduated 90+ startups which have gone onto raise $45M+ and have graduated into YC, Techstars, and more and have won hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and prizes. Learn more at the Almaworks website and direct any questions to almaworks@columbia.edu.

 

Design Your Future (Oct 15): The future can feel uncertain. What if you discover that your internship isn’t the right fit? What happens if you start to drift away from the things you feel passionate about? What trajectory is right for you? We created Design Your Future to sort through these types of questions. In this two-session program students will learn to apply design in order to better navigate careers and life choices in school and beyond. DYF will meet in the Columbia

Entrepreneurship Design Studio:
Friday, October 29th — 9:30am to 12:30pm ET
Friday, November 12th — 10:30am to 12:30pm ET

If you are interested, please fill out the application by 10pm on Friday, October 15th. We will get back to all applicants by 5pm on Monday, October 18th. Due to COVID restrictions, this program is only open to current Columbia students.

 

External

 

NYC[x] Moonshot Challenge on Financial Inclusion (Sept 20):  The NYC Mayor’s Office of the CTO is hosting the Moonshot Challenge, an open call for bold, innovative solutions that serve unbanked and underbanked New Yorkers.

 

Recruiter Track (Sept 26): First Round just launched a brand new program called Recruiter Track for those with little to no recruiting experience who are interested in making a career transition into startup recruiting. The idea is that we’ll teach the foundations of recruiting so that the students are well positioned for their first sourcing/recruiting role at a startup. We’ll cover Recruiting 101 topics with First Round’s own Talent Team & experts from top startups like Superhuman, Clover Health, and Pinwheel.