Tuesday, December 5, 2000

'Electronic Dorm' Gives U. of Maryland Students an Entrepreneurial Environment By FLORENCE OLSEN College Park, Md. In a dormitory furnished with the latest multimedia and wireless-communications equipment, the University of Maryland at College Park has created what administrators like to think of as their own Silicon Valley. Business educators are hoping that the technology-rich living-and-learning environment can help their students learn all about entrepreneurship. Twenty-one student entrepreneurs who live in the dorm, Garrett Hall, are among the first group of undergraduates accepted to participate in the new business-education program. The students are given the chance to learn by doing all of the things that entrepreneurs do -- coming up with ideas for new businesses, working in teams, writing business plans, seeking venture capital, making presentations, and, if they are successful, managing the growth of real businesses. The dorm can't accommodate all of the program's students -- 66 others are spread across the campus, but they take part in the meetings, the conference calls, and the networking that the program is meant to inspire. "Our students are going to walk out being adapted to the new economy and the new world," says Howard Frank, dean of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. At Maryland, entrepreneurship is taught in its own academic department in the business school. Students don't have to be enrolled the entrepreneurship department -- or even in the business school -- to be in the residential program, says Karen S. Thornton, the program's associate director. The residential-learning program, Ms. Thornton says, has attracted not only business and engineering majors but also students majoring in architecture, classics, economics, journalism, and life sciences. Students in those other majors who want to supplement the experience they get in the residential program can enroll in the university's four-semester Entrepreneurship Citation Program. It lets students earn credits for courses in starting, financing, and managing entrepreneurial ventures. The residential environment provides frequent and informal opportunities for students to get to know classmates who want to become entrepreneurs. The students also get to use many of the latest communications tools that can make businesses more efficient, and by extension, more profitable. On a recent weekday morning, upperclassmen in the entrepreneurial wing of Garrett Hall were using their computers as telephones and holding Internet video conferences with consultants across town and with entrepreneurs in the real Silicon Valley, in California. The dormitory's lounges and conference rooms are open to the students who are in the program but don't live in Garrett. John Kessinger, a junior who is a computer-science major, sat at a conference table with three business majors -- Jon Murchison, Joey Soleimanzadeh, and Ilya Zusin -- while they conducted a video teleconference "brainstorming" session with an executive of CacheFlow Inc., an Internet company in Sunnyvale, Calif. Another team of students held forth about their business plans for creating a prisoner-tracking system using Global Positioning System satellites and inexpensive G.P.S. receivers. "In many ways, this residence hall is both a testbed and a showcase" for new information technologies, Ms. Thornton says. The residential-learning program is called Hinman Campus Entrepreneurship Opportunities, or C.E.O.'s, and was started with a $1.7-million gift from Brian Hinman, a 1982 electrical-engineering graduate of the university who became a successful entrepreneur. At 22, he was a co-founder of the PictureTel Corporation, a company that makes video-teleconferencing equipment. His third and latest company is 2Wire Inc., which makes home-networking technology that gives people high-speed Internet access from telephone jacks anywhere in their homes. The Hinman C.E.O.'s program, which now has 87 student entrepreneurs, will move into a new apartment-style dormitory in January 2002. The new dormitory will have "very upscale conference rooms, so that when we get to the point where we have a lot of students trying to pitch to venture capitalists, it will be a very respectable place to host those guests," Ms. Thornton says. Most of the high-tech gear in the C.E.O.'s dormitory comes from Avaya Inc., the former Lucent Technologies New Enterprise Networks Group, with which the university has a research-and-development memorandum of understanding. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Swarthmore drops 3 sports, prompting an uproar on the campus Hampton U. campaign raises $216-million, shattering record for black colleges In 11th-hour deal, U. of Washington deflects strike by T.A.'s Ruling on Prop. 209 could affect U. of California's minority-recruitment programs Russia announces new effort to stem brain drain Japanese universities, one public and one private, agree to unprecedented cooperation "Electronic dorm" gives U. of Maryland students an entrepreneurial environment Commission's Web site helps colleges put student services online