Dear Friends of the Dyer Center,
The energy and buzz is back on college hill as students return from across the world and the spring semester gets underway. This is an exciting time for the Dyer Center as we bring back some of our most popular and impactful programming including our business pitch competition and real estate investment case competition. But it’s also a semester of firsts, particularly on the curricular front.
This semester, Lafayette welcomes social entrepreneur and Princeton Professor, Marty Johnson to campus to teach a course on social entrepreneurship. Demand was so robust that registration filled after the 2nd day and freshmen and sophomores never had a chance to register.
We are also partnering with Professor Dave Veshosky on his construction management course, where in lieu of a 20 page paper, students will be tasked with identifying and prototyping a potential industry innovation.
On the first day of class students will visit the Dyer Center where we will teach them about problem identification and definition. We will walk them through building an empathy and user journey map to identify pain points and provide ongoing support as they work to build a functional prototype over the course of the semester.
This type of collaboration and assignment has never been attempted in the class, but as Prof Veshosky says, “not sure if it will work or not, but it will definitely give students a taste of the type of value they will be expected to create after graduation.”
I’m excited for the semester and for the future of entrepreneurship at Lafayette. Alumni support has been strong, faculty have been engaged, and students are enthusiastic. However, we cannot let our foot off the gas, we must redouble our efforts and execute with renewed energy to transform entrepreneurship education at Lafayette.
Please share our newsletter with alumni and parents that might be interested, follow us on social media (twitter, linkedin & instagram- Dyer_Lafayette, Facebook), and most importantly connect with me and ask how you can get involved.
Looking forward to connecting with many of you soon.
Yusuf