Institute For Entrepreneurship College

Monday, April 23, 2007 at 12:49pm by David Askaripour in School

You all know how much I hate the fact that colleges are ignoring young entrepreneurs by not offering courses in entrepreneurship, you know how I bash the traditional / theoretical teachings that most business classes use in their courses, and you know that I’m disgusted by the amount of non-entrepreneur professors who end up teaching business classes throughout our university systems.

Well, today, just a few hours ago, I learned of a new program called the Institute for Entrepreneurs at Grand Canyon University. I sat down with Danny Kessler, one of the founding students of the program, and discussed what he’s been up to over at the institution.

I have to tell you, from what I hear about the program, I’m definitely breathing a bit easier and am so delighted to hear that such a school was created.

I won’t go into the history of the institution, you can learn that from the site, but what I’d like to discuss is how the actual classes are conducted — this is what’s really interesting.

I asked Danny to describe a typical class for me and I’ve summarized/paraphrased his responses below:

So, tell me about the professors. What’s their background?

All the professors are entrepreneurs with real experience. I’m currently taking a PR/Marketing class and the professor ran a multi-million dollar PR company that she recently sold to Intel. All of the professors are quality and have real experience.

What do you actually do in class?

Class is like one big open discussion. We all throw around ideas, discuss concepts, and help one another out by offering suggestions for their business. We also spend a lot of time reading blogs and other websites. For instance, if we are learning about PR we may all go to prweb.com and discuss different strategies from that site. We don’t use books and cover theory, we actually “do” things and engage in real conversations about entrepreneurship.

Each class we have a speaker come and talk to us about a particular entrepreneurial subject. We have CEOs, consultants, networking gurus, etc. come and talk to us and answer our questions. They provide valuable suggestions and solutions for us to implement into our own businesses.

How long is the program?

Since it’s incorporated into the Grand Canyon curriculum, you still have to take liberal arts courses to satisfy your full degree. However, for the entrepreneurship program, you meet once a week for 4 hours. Each course is given 8 weeks, 2 course per semester.

Do the professors ask for your input of how the class should be run?

Absolutely! They constantly ask “what do you think about the way I am running the class? What can we improve? What can we add/modify/cut?” The professors are basically running the classes based upon what the “students” want to learn, not the other way around.

Any homework?

Homework consists of things like pitching your business idea to the class and trying to sell them on your idea. We don’t get traditional homework like something you’d get in a business class. Our homework is hands-on, not questions that we study out of a book.

So, as you can see, this entrepreneurship program is quite disruptive. I love what these guys are doing. It’s great to know that we are heading in the right direction when I see programs like this popping up. I wish the Institute for Entrepreneurship the best and look forward to seeing them grow.

Rock on!

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