“I have a lot of friends I went to engineering school with who are very entrepreneurially-minded. That’s their passion. I feel like I’d be selling myself short if I just got an industry research position in a lab for the rest of my life. I’d be cutting off my potential.” Laura Ensign, graduate student in ChemBE
And that’s a competency to which 21st-century engineering students are demanding they have access. Ultimately, at any institution, the consumer rules, and today’s student consumers are coming of age at a time when some of the most successful engineer-cum-entrepreneurs (hello, Mark Zuckerberg!) look exactly like they do, right down to the scraggly clothes and unlined faces.
“There’s a feeling, an expectation that you’re supposed to do something bigger. That’s the burden of our generation, that you’re not supposed to be just an expert in one thing or just stay in a narrow niche,” says 27-year-old Laura Ensign. “I have a lot of friends I went to engineering school with who are very entrepreneurially minded. That’s their passion. I feel like I’d be selling myself short if I just got an industry research position in a lab for the rest of my life. I’d be cutting off my potential.”
Ensign’s philosophy is music to the ears of Phil Green ’58, the School of Engineering alumnus who was a pioneer in medical robotics. Green sits on the school’s Technology and Commercialization Advisory Board, a nationwide group of 40 successful tech-minded alumni chaired by Phil Garfinkle, P ’10, ’13, a former key player in Kodak’s Chief Tech-nology Office who created and sold several tech-oriented start-ups.
Green’s main role is to find venture capital for potential Whiting School start-ups, but he also sees a direct pipeline back to Johns Hopkins in the offing, with each new venture serving as both a thought catalyst and employment opportunity for business-minded engineering graduates. “[These new ventures will] help school Hopkins grads in the idea that ‘you can do this, it’s available to you, and it’s exciting,'” he says.
Indeed, some area ventures are showing signs of just such a pipeline. Engineers John Trupiano, BS/MS ’06, and Yair Flicker, BS/MS ’06, both of whom took extensive CLE business course work (Flicker graduated with an E&M minor), started SmartLogic Solutions Web consulting five years ago; they’ve already grown their start-up to eight employees, including, since their start, three Hopkins engineering grads. Similarly, T. Rowe Price has, through 2010, annually chosen at least one Hopkins engineering senior for its extremely competitive two-year investment fellows program (see sidebar). The program combines the ability to create complex mathematical trending models with the management and communication skills necessary in the financial world. Vice President Sean Jones, who directs the fellowship, is blunt about the advantage Whiting School grads have.
“We’re looking for people with strong analytical skills but who don’t just want to sit in a lab. They need to get out, talk to people, and dig into problems. What distinguishes people in the program…is going beyond the basics of what’s asked of you. Can you run with the problem, go find solutions, do research on your own, pull things together, and do the analysis without a huge amount of guidance?” says Jones. “So those with entrepreneurial skills, those who are creative, driven-those do well in this program, and we get a lot of them from Hopkins.”
Karin Hwang is optimistic that one day, funding and providence willing, she’ll be able to employ future CBID grads as well. Nate Sunwoo, her partner in CervoCheck, was a fellow CBIDer, and Hwang hopes that someday soon there will be plenty of room at the incubator for a few new old friends.
“We’re always looking at Hopkins folks for potential internships or to later on add to our team. Especially those people from our program who have our skill set. I can see in the future us becoming a pipeline,” Hwang says.
As they say in both business and engineering…it’s all about the flow.