Mackenzie Millar ’08
I returned to Colgate as a first-time mentor with TIA over Labor Day weekend, just about ten years after I graduated. I’ve worked in investing, consulting, and technology in New York City, Hong Kong, and San Francisco, and I’ve come to believe that entrepreneurship isn’t just about running your own venture; it’s about developing a skill set that’s foundational to being effective and impactful in all kinds of professional environments.
As a liberal arts institution, Colgate tends to produce people who are well-suited to this form of entrepreneurship – but that’s happened as a side effect, never as a formal program or an explicitly-stated goal of the university. And Colgate’s not alone; there are very few programs across the country that teach entrepreneurship non-academically. So when I learned about TIA, I was delighted to see a program that focused on developing entrepreneurial skills in a lower-risk environment that harnessed the enthusiasm of the students with the support of alumni mentors who could share their experience and provide guidance from years out beyond the world of Colgate.
Now that I’ve experienced the program for myself, I wanted to share a few things that stood out to me – about how TIA is structured, why I think it’s valuable, and how we can make it even stronger.
1. Learning by doing
TIA is fundamentally based on enabling students with an idea and initiative to pursue their ventures with seriousness. The students in my group were working on a broad set of business ideas, from handmade accessories, to a blockchain voting app, to photography and videography services. Some of them were tangible and easy to understand, while others focused on markets and products quite foreign to us. But by focusing on something universally applicable to all these businesses – the pitch! – we’re able to coach students to simply and clearly convey their idea to any audience. I can’t think of a skill that’s more foundational to entrepreneurship.
2. Socratic mentorship
For alumni, the TIA program is a wonderful way to directly invest time and experience back into Colgate. It’s a rare opportunity to work alongside current students, and one of my favorite tenets of TIA mentorship is to practice the Socratic method — to remember that these aren’t our ventures, and we’re not there to fix, but to encourage, provoke, and most importantly, to listen. It’s an approach that facilitates self-reflection, giving students the tools to find answers on their own. As an alum, it’s a delight to practice listening rather than telling. It’s a reminder that we should always seek out ways to continue developing ourselves into better entrepreneurs, and that the entrepreneurial journey is never complete.
3. Local focus over global scale
One of my favorite parts of the program was seeing such a range of ideas from the students. Media coverage tends to focus on businesses that have the potential to go global, that carry an exponential, hockey stick-shaped growth curve. But small-business ownership is a personal endeavor, a means of self-sufficiency. As mentors, we aren’t focused on making each business into the next Amazon or Google, but in helping students to make the business as local or global as they want. And whether those businesses thrive or don’t continue, our goal is to plant the seed to encourage these students to take on the next venture, or to apply the tools of entrepreneurship elsewhere in their lives and in their communities. I’m proud to be part of it.
I’m looking forward to my next trip up to Colgate, and I’m eager to hear about the progress the students have made over the course of the month. I want to thank Wills and Mary for spearheading the program, and to the rest of the mentors for continuing to make the program a success each year. See you soon!
Mackenzie Millar is a senior design researcher at Dropbox, where she conducts user research to guide new product development. Prior to that, she was an innovation strategist at frog design, a global design consulting firm focused on creating and bringing new products to market for small and large companies alike. She’s worked for two small startups, as an operator and P&L owner inside larger multinational corporations, and she advises and consults for a range of seed-stage companies on pitching investors and brand and messaging to customers and users.
Great post Mackenzie—-really insightful!