The Center for Entrepreneurship’s flagship immersive co-curricular program, the Entrepreneurs Leadership Program (ELP), is proud to announce the selection of 23 outstanding students for the 2023 Cohort supported by an impressive set of 23 mentors. You can find the public roster for the 2023 ELP Cohort here. This marks the eighth consecutive year for the program, now boasting more than 165 exceptional alumni fellows.
ELP provides deep training and mentorship for a select cohort of students to develop the functional, managerial, and leadership skills that differentiate the good from the great entrepreneurs. It equips some of the University of Michigan’s most driven minds with a rigorous experiential curriculum to lead them onto an entrepreneurial path during and after their college career. Student outcomes are tied to founding and operating disruptive tech-based ventures, leading investment in important startups, and contributing to the ELP entrepreneurial community. Ultimately, the goal of this program is to develop “Michigan Entrepreneurs”.
The CFE Entrepreneurial Practice Programs team utilized both in person and online recruitment events to attract a large and diverse pool of applicants that included first-year to PhD students hailing from more than eight schools and colleges at U-M. Many of these events utilized partnerships with student organizations, and were crafted in a way to demonstrate and showcase the entrepreneurial mindset, a central framework taught through ELP. The annual Innovation Challenge, in partnership with MPowered, the largest and oldest student organization promoting entrepreneurship on campus, recruited more than 180 participants.
Other recruitment events included a Women in ENTRepreneurship panel to recruit more women in the program. This networking event featured three UM-affiliated professionals, Margarita Hernandez, PhD – Vice President of Entrepreneurial Services, Ann Arbor Spark and University of Michigan alum; Janet Price, PhD – Chief Scientific Officer at JustLight and University of Michigan alum; along with Kasia Glanowska, PhD – Venture Analyst, Michigan Biomedical Venture Fund, who spoke about the importance to building a network of mentors to help you learn from their experiences as you work toward taking steps to accomplish your goals.
All of these recruitment activities were coupled with a rigorous assessment process that included blind review of applications and interviews with more than 50 students. CFE staff, ELP alumni, and mentors for the incoming cohort were tapped to provide feedback to ultimately determine a diverse, technically talented, and entrepreneurial gifted student cohort. The result is a cohort featuring students from all academic years (first year to PhD) that represent 14 distinct academic disciplines from five schools and colleges. Notably, this student cohort has shown strong interest in leveraging their ELP resources and experiences to commercialize products and services focused on health-tech, bio-tech, climate and sustainability, robotics, and manufacturing.
“As someone who strives to make a mark in this world, I applied to ELP to develop the knowledge, skills, and relationships needed to make my ideas a reality. I am very excited about this upcoming year and look forward to working with my cohort to solve real-world problems and disrupt the status quo,” said Jooyoung Chung, current junior studying Political Science at the University of Michigan.
To buttress the students’ efforts toward their entrepreneurial career goals is a cohort of 23 accomplished entrepreneurs and investors, many of which are alumni. This has become a major strength of the program as the mentor cohort provides current expertise and leadership in the emerging markets relevant to the student’s careers such as innovative healthcare, intellectual property, advanced mobility, venture capital, and IoT. This is the second year of the formalization of the Mentor Matching feature of the ELP, in which each student is assigned a mentor for the winter semester. Meeting 1:1 four times from January through April, the mentors will help each student develop a set of attainable goals for the program related to their career goals and will aid them in their progress.
The entire ELP and CFE community is excited to welcome this new group of students and mentors to the program.
If you’re interested in connecting with a 2023 ELP Cohort student for a potential internship or mentorship opportunity, contact Nick Moroz at nmoroz@umich.edu or Crista Deneau at cldeneau@umich.edu.