From Campus to Company
The Entrepreneurship Clinic celebrates 10 years of setting up students for real-world success.
For the past 10 years, the Entrepreneurship Clinic has guided more than 900 students through high-impact, experiential learning. “We’re asking [students] to apply and create real value for a company partner who’s struggling with something,” says clinic director Haley Huie ’06. The clinic uses what Huie calls the “hospital teaching model” to achieve this, pairing students with a company to diagnose and treat the company’s pain point. An instructor guides students, just like an attending physician would guide medical students, and they get to see the difference their work makes in the end. “This is very much a bridge into the real world,” Huie says.
The clinic also supports the Andrews Launch Accelerator, a 12-week summer program that helps NC State students and recent alumni jump-start their own businesses. And overlaying it all, Huie says, is mentorship. The clinic connects students with mentors across campus and brings in industry leaders for classroom projects.
The program is open to all majors, and Huie says that many students leave the program with internships, part-time jobs or even full-time offers in hand. Isabella Dearr ’23 is one of those students. After working on a project for Blue Co., a coworking startup for blue-collar businesses, she was offered a job with the founder’s other company, Raleigh Founded. “There are some fundamentals that you have to learn through a textbook,” Dearr says, while noting that many skills necessary for entrepreneurship can only be learned by doing.
Dearr moonlights as a muralist and creates custom-designed shoes for clients as part of her business, Dearr Bella. She credits the Entrepreneurship Clinic with setting her on the right track. “If I had never taken entrepreneurship classes, I wouldn’t take myself as seriously as a business owner,” she says. In fact, Dearr has experienced the clinic both as a student and as a company partner. Students in the clinic helped her with market research for mural-logistics software she is developing. “Founders are juggling a million things,” she says. “They don’t have time to be thorough with every little [detail].”
In the future, after her time at Raleigh Founded, Dearr wants to work in a creative space in some way, but she’s not sure specifically how. Her experience with the clinic will continue to prove beneficial as she finds her way. The Entrepreneurship Clinic prepares students like Dearr for “careers that don’t even exist yet,” Huie says.
“It is a career accelerator.”
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