“We had our minds set on getting a job after graduation, and now we have something on our plate that is really exciting to think about growing.”

Julia, Hannah and Jennifer
ExEC Entrepreneurs

What if Your Course Changed the Career Trajectory of Your Students?

That’s what happened to Dr. Emma Fleck at Susquehanna University, and her students Julia Bodner, Hannah Gruber, and Jennifer Thorsheim.

Using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) in their Fall 2017 course taught by Dr. Emma Fleck, Julia, Hannah, and Jennifer discovered skills and confidence they didn’t know they had, created a business, and won an all-expenses-paid trip to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota to present their business in e-Fest and the Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge.

We are hearing similar stories from entrepreneurship classrooms around the world using ExEC as their curriculum. The learning is lasting. The experience is dynamic. The students are transformed.

If you want engaged students and a classroom alive with ideas and passion and growth, check out our curriculum. If you’re not convinced, let us tell you a story . . .

Students Become Entrepreneurs

Prior to Dr. Fleck’s course, Julia, Jen and Hannah “were a little nervous when [they] got the assignment of creating a company”. They didn’t think they were creative enough, and had reservations going into the course.

Dr. Fleck urged her students to solve problems that were personal to them; one of the early lessons in ExEC is using ideation exercises to discover a problem to solve. Jennifer flashed back to a recent experience:

She was in London, traveling on the tube, and was followed home by a strange man. She told her parents, who urged her to take an Uber next time she was traveling, so she did. That experience was no better; her driver was being “really weird”, telling her she looked like his ex-girlfriend, and in general creating a very uncomfortable atmosphere for Jennifer.

The ideation exercises in the ExEC curriculum, combined with the existence of a threat for women traveling alone, sparked an “Uber for women” idea for the three young women. They became very passionate about developing a business providing safe transportation for women on college campuses. And Fairy Godmother was born!

In their words, 

“we wanted to bring this issue to light and attack it where we can. College campuses are a really big party scene, obviously, with people taking Ubers and taxis home after nights out, and we hear way too many stories about women in uncomfortable situations. We just wanted to try and alleviate that and fix [the problem].”

During the course they navigated collecting interview and survey data, building and iterating a business model, and struggled through financial projections. They found ExEC and the course beneficial because

“it took us step-by-step through the process; at every stage, we felt comfortable moving forward. The way the course was set up really helped us.”

Students Love ExEC!

In this short video, Julia, Jen and Hannah explain what using ExEC meant to them. This is the student feedback every teacher dreams of! You can get it with ExEC.

In the video above, the Fairy Godmothers explain the value of their ExEC course!

ExEC will teach your students to create a startup just like Fairy Godmother. Click on the image below to check out their Unbounce landing page, which they created using the 60 Minute MVP exercise from ExEC to create this landing page.

Your Students Can Compete!

Julia, Jennifer and Hannah entered Fairy Godmother in the annual e-fest/Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge event, and were selected as finalists! 

Although they were nominated for the Social Impact and the Global Impact Awards, Fairy Godmother left empty-handed in terms of awards and funding. But they left with something much more important – confidence!

The experience gave them validation that they were capable of building something from their ideas; judges and other students sought them out individually to encourage them to push forward.

The Final Results

Dr. Fleck used ExEC to lead Jen, Julia and Hannah to identify a problem they are passionate about solving, conduct research and customer interviews, build out a landing page and develop a business and financial model. This experience gave them confidence and a toolkit with which they can excel in the world. Your students can have too – sign up to use ExEC today!

Your Impact Will Grow Beyond Your Course

Julia, Jennifer, and Hannah experienced a different senior year spring semester than their friends. They certainly were thinking about a job and life post-college. But because of their experience in Dr. Fleck’s class, they also were thinking about next steps with their business.

They continued working on their business model and landed on a licensing model for college campuses, charging a flat fee and also taking a percentage of each fare.

They knew another group of students would be going through Dr. Fleck’s course, using the same ExEC curriculum, learning from the same (amazing!) professor. Julia, Jen and Hannah began thinking about passing along part of their business to this new batch of students. They would stay involved, but they also would get new energy and ideas. The Fairy Godmother team is working on the legalities of licensing, delving into the murky waters of financials, and putting together a plan to enable more students to help them take their business to the next level.

As they told us,

“the next steps of the business aren’t as scary; the class and the experience makes entrepreneurship less scary.”

After their experience, they knew they could overcome the uncertainty they would encounter, and could navigate the boulders in their path. These women were not as afraid to take risks and stood a little taller as they faced the challenges of entrepreneurship and of life after college.

Looking Back

Julia, Jennifer, and Hannah entered an undergraduate entrepreneurship course like most of our students do – nervously excited about the unknown. The ExEC curriculum and Dr. Fleck’s caring guidance delivered these women a experience that changed them in unimaginable ways. Specifically, the main skills they honed in the course were:

• Problem Solving: “We learned how to find a problem and to think of a viable solution to bring to market.”
• Creativity: “We thought we weren’t creative, but we discovered that we definitely are.”
• Teamwork: “We were good friends, but never worked in a team. This class forced us to work together and perform under a lot of pressure.”
• Risk-tolerance: “We feel more comfortable taking risks now.”

Julia, Jennifer and Hannah experienced what we all hope our students experience in our courses. They learned real skills and how to apply them to real life. They learned they can accomplish big goals, that they never thought possible. They experimented, they failed, they launched, and they grew, as individuals and as a team:

“None of us were thinking we could be entrepreneurs, and now we all feel like we can [be entrepreneurs]!”

You Can Use ExEC this Fall

When planning for your fall entrepreneurship courses, consider our comprehensive, structured curriculum; ExEC’s 25+ detailed lesson plans, exercises, and assessments provide the foundation for your entrepreneurship course, so you can teach real-world entrepreneurial skills like:

• Idea generation
• Problem validation
• Customer interviews
• MVP development
• and more…

…in a rigorous way, that can be consistently assessed.

Request a preview of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum today and make this Fall the most engaging semester of entrepreneurship yet!

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