If someone were to ask you to describe an entrepreneur, you’d probably think of someone in a suit making high-stakes deals, or a tech guru in Silicon Valley developing the latest app and getting it out on the street. Or maybe you stayed closer to home and thought of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln students who founded the wildly successful sports start-up, Hudl.
You probably didn’t think of a scientist in a lab coat, someone writing a grant proposal, or a teacher working with undergraduates. That’s because we tend to think of academics as solitary thinkers who are tucked away at the bench or in the library, working long hours on a small part of a problem. This imaginary academic discovers information that other people apply to solving real-world problems.
You may think that you have to choose to be one or the other, when you can take some of the positive characteristics of the entrepreneur and apply them to being a graduate student.
Visit our most recent blog post on thinking like an entrepreneur for tips.