UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State senior Lily Schoenherr said she’s having her best semester yet.
After she graduates in May, Schoenherr will start with PwC as a management consulting associate. She said she’s looking forward to living in Manhattan again, working with a wide range of clients to help them solve problems and using her newfound entrepreneurial skills.
Although she discovered it later in her college career, Schoenherr said her experiences with the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Minor (ENTI) helped her find her passions and secure her first professional full-time job.
Two years ago, she was worried about choosing the right major, which she thought would lead to the right internship and eventually the right job. It didn’t go quite according to plan. At the end of her second year, Schoenherr chose finance as her major, but said her internships in the field showed her it wasn’t the industry for her.
During her junior year, Schoenherr began taking ENTI classes as part of the New Ventures Cluster. She said she enjoyed working collaboratively on projects, learning the fundamentals of starting your own business and thinking like an entrepreneur.
“I think that after college, no matter what job you’re looking at, you’re going to be successful with an entrepreneurial mindset,” she said.
It was through the Forté Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the careers of women in business, during her junior year that she learned about management consulting: how it has an entrepreneurial bent that played to her strengths. After workshops and networking within Forté, Schoenherr began sending several messages per week to recruiters on LinkedIn asking to set up meetings. She went to as many recruiting events as possible and kept up with the contacts she made. She also credited Ashley Rippey, director of the Business Career Center in the Smeal College of Business, for helping her find her way to a business career that excites her.
In her seven interviews over the last few months with PwC and other big firms, Schoenherr said she leaned heavily on her experiences in the ENTI minor. When interviewers asked her about project-based work, she referred to her entrepreneurship courses. During the case interviews, she said her entrepreneurial mindset and curiosity helped her demonstrate that she could have a big-picture perspective.
"There's no right answer to the interviews, but there is a way to go about it,” she said. “They want to know how you think, what questions you’re asking. That's where that entrepreneurial spirit and intellectual curiosity come in.”
ENTI draws on expertise from across Penn State, including faculty in the arts, hospitality, media, technology, life sciences and more. Jamey Darnell, clinical assistant professor of entrepreneurship in the Smeal College of Business, is the director of the New Ventures Cluster in the ENTI program. He said instructors facilitate experiential learning in the ENTI classes across the colleges.
“In fact, problem-based learning is referenced in the official course descriptions and learning outcomes for the ENTI core courses,” Darnell said. “By having specific projects with specific outcomes, students can create a portfolio of their class work to discuss with and show recruiters.”
Many other ENTI graduates say the minor was frequently brought up in their job interviews, according to written comments on exit surveys. Respondents said interviewers frequently honed in on the ENTI minor on their resumes, and their classroom experiences helped them prepare to talk intelligently about business skills and terminology.
“A lot of the job interviews that I applied for were in the tech consulting industry,” said one survey respondent. “Every time I gave a recruiter my resume, they would circle my minor because that was the first thing that stood out to them. To add to that, recruiters during interviews would always ask me to elaborate on the projects that I have done during my courses and I think it's helped me a significant amount in terms of getting a job.”
“I’m not surprised when ENTI students tell me that recruiters express interest in the skills, knowledge and values they acquire in our entrepreneurship classes,” said Anne Hoag, director of the Center for Penn State Student Entrepreneurship. “In the last decade more than 19,000 Penn State students from 170 different majors have come through our program. We’d love to see even more students benefit from entrepreneurship education, whether or not they plan to start their own enterprises.”
About the ENTI minor
The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Minor is a part of the Center for Penn State Student Entrepreneurship and supported by Penn State Undergraduate Education.
All ENTI students take three core courses: MGMT 215: Entrepreneurial Mindset, ENGR 310: Entrepreneurial Leadership and MGMT 425/ENGR 425/IST 425: New Venture Creation. In addition to the nine core credits, students take three more courses as part of one of ten concentration areas known as clusters: Arts Entrepreneurship, Bio-Tech, Digital Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Entrepreneurship as Advocacy, Food and Bio-Innovation, Hospitality Management, New Media, New Ventures, Social Entrepreneurship and Technology Based Entrepreneurship.
Students can declare the ENTI minor after they attain a third-semester classification or have been accepted to a major. The ENTI minor does not have entrance requirements and can be declared in LionPATH.