and a competition that sent student teams around U-M’s student union to pitch a fake company based on a noun-adjective combination drawn from a hat.
“Working on eRes is a chance for me to help other people realize that the ideas that everyone has, you can move those forward if you want,” says project co-director Adam Feldman. “So even if you’re not going to go on a start a company, the entrepreneurial mindset can be very helpful in whatever you’re doing.”
Prateek Greg, the president of MPowered Entrepreneurship, the group spearheading eRes, says students are working with administration officials to officially recognize eRes as a living-learning community.
Once the university officially attaches the program to an academic unit, then its status as a living-learning community will become more solidified, Merritt says. Until then, housing officials can still help interested students reside in the same hall and assign resident advisors with an interest in entrepreneurship to the floors housing the program.
Scott Christopher, a freshman in U-M’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts says he plans to live in eRes come fall because he wants to meet students with a similar desire to solve problems they see around them.
“Entrepreneurship is really something that I believe can be adapted to anything in life, if it’s a family, if it’s a business,” Christopher says. “All entrepreneurship boils down to is actively solving problems. I view it as really tackling problems head first.”