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STUDENT ENTREPRENEURSHIP: IT'S NOT JUST FOR BUSINESS MAJORS ANYMORE

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Jesse Hercules and John Didion squeezed an ambitious extracurricular activity into their already hectic schedules as sophomores in Northwestern University's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

In addition to their classes in subjects like vector calculus and thermodynamics, they've added client meetings and business planning sessions. With other student partners, they started their own business, WebMasterworks Internet Publishing Corporation. Launched in June of last year, when its proprietors were freshmen, the fledgling Web design and consulting firm has several projects for paying clients and is "out there making money," Hercules says.

Webmasterworks (www.webmasterworks.com) has a portfolio that includes six web sites for commercial and non-profit clients. Prices start at $750 to design and publish a "minimal" website. The company will maintain a site on a server and bill clients monthly, or consult on an hourly basis.

Engineering students are joining business majors in the growing ranks of student entrepreneurs. In fact, Hercules, with one of his professors, Gregory B. Olson, professor of materials science and engineering, this year started an "Enterprise Club" for like-minded engineering students with dreams of launching their own start-ups. An overflow crowd of 70 McCormick students showed up at the first meeting in late January.

At that first meeting, industrial engineering professor Donald N. Frey, head of the design team that produced the original Ford Mustang and a former CEO of Bell & Howell, discussed "how to find funding for your venture, what to do with a patentable idea, why a small firm has advantages over entrenched corporations, and the intrinsic rewards, and costs, of the entrepreneur life," Hercules said.

Subsequent meetings have included a business decisions workshop and a symposium on the legal issues of starting a business. "You don't want to wind up on the wrong side of the law," Hercules noted.

Hercules and Didion were inspired to start WebMasterworks during their freshman year, as a result of skills they learned in McCormick's new "Engineering First" curriculum, which emphasizes design, teamwork, project management and engineering ethics from the outset. In one of their courses, called Engineering Design and Communication, which is co-taught by faculty of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences' Writing Program, the two classmates learned how to design and publish Web-based material. They also learned how to work with real clients.

"Engineering Design and Communication provided us concrete lessons in intelligent, consistent and coherent design," Hercules says. "The skills we gained were marketable, and we decided to put them to use as we've seen others do in the marketplace."

The new firm received free legal, marketing and business-planning advice through the Northwestern-Evanston Research Park, even though they were operating out of their dorm rooms. But they also learned from professor-entrepreneurs, like J. Edward Colgate, associate professor of mechanical engineering, who is part of the team that teaches Engineering Design and Communication. Colgate and his department colleague Michael A. Peshkin founded Collaborative Motion Control to commercialize their brainchild, the cobot -- a collaborative robot that provides an intelligent assist, such as to autoworkers maneuvering heavy components into a vehicle.

"What I put back into my teaching," says Colgate, "is specific experience that I've had in how design problems are dealt with in the business world. When I combine that with lessons in design, the students' level of interest and confidence in these areas increases."

Hercules and Didion's partners are William Loo, a sophomore in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and Steven Tiell, a student at the Ohio State University.