Entrepreneurship Courses and Seminars
Harvey Mudd College offers the courses below for students interested in pursuing classes with an entrepreneurship focus. New courses will be developed and included here as they become available.
ENTR 179: Entrepreneurial Workshop
Credit(s): 1.5
Offered: Fall 22
Description: This is a hands-on practical class, essentially like a workshop or a lab. The objective of this class is to help students find a repeatable and scalable business model for their startup with significantly less money and in a shorter time by using Lean Launchpad strategies instead of traditional methods. Student teams will start with a creative/innovative idea for a product to meet customers’ unmet needs. They will develop a set of untested hypotheses and validate them quickly. They will use a business model canvas to diagram value creation for customers and validate hypotheses to create a repeatable, scalable business model. Teams will rapidly iterate their product to build something people actually want. They will build minimum viable products (MVPs) to avoid hypotheticals and get real customer feedback that they can use to iterate (small adjustments) or pivot (substantive changes) faster. In the end, the student teams will pitch their startup ideas to Venture Capitalists.
ID 049: Entrepreneurship
Credit(s): .5
Instructor(s): Kash Gokli & guest speakers
Offered: Spring 22
Prerequisite(s): Open to all
Description: This course features guest speakers and group discussions to give students a solid understating of entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurs, including HMC alumni, will share their success stories and cover topics of interest, such as innovative products, funding, intellectual property, customers (discovery, validation, & creation), sales, marketing, cash flow, product launch, etc. The course will be of particular interest to students who would like to launch a startup upon graduation or later, students who want to join established companies and apply their entrepreneurial skills and spirit, and students who would like to be social entrepreneurs to impact society. Open to all students.
| Class day | Date | Guest speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1/20/22 | Kash – Class details and intro, Josh – Is it for you? |
| 2 | 1/27/22 | Sergio Monsalve P25 – The Value of an Entrepreneurial Mindset |
| 3 | 2/3/22 | Leslie Field – Entrepreneurship and Climate Change |
| 4 | 2/10/22 | Edith Harbaugh ’99 – From Engineer to Entrepreneur |
| 5 | 2/17/22 | Brian Bentow ’05 – Selecting the co-founder, Business idea presentations |
| 6 | 2/24/22 | Benson Tsai ’06 – Company Building and what it means to be a CEO/founder |
| 7 | 3/3/22 | Michael Blend – Taking a company from idea to public |
| 9 | 3/10/22 | Mar Hershenson – Lean Startup Methodology |
| 10 | 3/17/22 | Spring Break |
| 11 | 3/24/22 | Bob Hulse ’96/97 – IP Issues for Startups |
| 12 | 3/31/22 | Prince Bohjwani – Starting & Scaling a Non-Profit |
| 13 | 4/7/22 | Jim Castelaz ’06 – Sales + Marketing: Finding Your First Customer |
| 14 | 4/14/22 | Ho Nam – A Different Approach to Venture Capital |
| 15 | 4/21/22 | Demo Day |
Schedule: dinner with students 5–6:20 p.m.; class presentation: 6:30–7:45 p.m.
On the last day, there was a pitch competition. Ten teams pitched their startup ideas. Mar Hershenson, Sergio Monsalve, Josh Jones, and Miles Bird were the judges.
Two teams won the pitch competition and will now pitch to venture capitalists in Northern California and Santa Monica. Read the article on the event at HMC Entrepreneurship Class Produces First Startups.
Computer Science 121: Software Development
Credit(s): 3
Instructor(s): Sweedyk, Wu
Offered: Fall and spring
Description: Introduction to the discipline concerned with the design and implementation of software systems. The course presents a historical perspective on software development practice and explores modern, agile techniques for eliciting software requirements, designing and implementing software architecture and modules, robust testing practices, and project management. Student teams design, develop, and test a substantial software project.
Prerequisite(s): CSCI070 HM
Computer Science 189: Programming Practicum
Credit(s): 1
Instructor(s): Dodds, Stone, Sweedyk
Offered: Fall and spring
Description: This course is a weekly programming seminar, emphasizing efficient recognition of computational problems and their difficulty, developing and implementing algorithms to solve them, and the testing of those implementations. Attention is given to the effective use of programming tools and available libraries, as well as to the dynamics of team problem-solving. No more than 3 credits can count toward the major elective requirement.
Repeatable: May be taken for major elective credit up to three times
Prerequisite(s): CSCI005 HM or CSCI005GR HM or CSCI042 HM
Engineering 004: Introduction to Engineering Design and Manufacturing
Credits: 4
Offered: Fall and spring
Description: Design problems are, typically, open-ended and ill-structured. Students work in small teams applying techniques for solving design problems that are, normally, posed by not-for-profit clients. The project work is enhanced with lectures and reading on design theory and methods, and introduction to manufacturing techniques, project management techniques and engineering ethics. Enrollment limited to first-year students and sophomores, or by permission of the instructor.
Prerequisites: WRIT001 HM
Concurrent requisites: PHYS024 HM
Engineering 181: New Product Development
Credits: 3
Description: This course will introduce the theory and practice of a process used for new product development that considers design, management and manufacturing components. Students will identify needs (market or humanitarian) amenable to an engineered product solution, select and scope the project need they will address, quantify the impact of a solution through a business case, design and develop multiple prototype solutions, validate the resulting product and solicit funding for a launch.
Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing and ENGR004 HM
Engineering 183: Management of Technical Enterprise
Credits: 3
Instructor: Kash Gokli
Offered: Fall
Description: This course provides a fundamental understanding of management practices in a technical enterprise. Instructors teach three main learning modules: financial management, people management and company management. Students will learn processes, tools, organization and measurables in all three learning modules.
Prerequisites: ENGR004 HM and Junior standing.