Building Game-Changers from the Bottom Up: Catalyst Class Series
IDEA has spent the past decade helping Northeastern staff, faculty, students and alumni build businesses. However, our mission isn’t to create successful ventures — it’s to create successful entrepreneurs. In pursuit of this goal, we educate our founders about business modeling, prototyping, market analysis and pitching. However, entrepreneurship is a lifestyle that requires more than textbook skills. It requires strategy, insight, self-awareness & endurance.
I’m a psychology major who was drawn to the opportunities within entrepreneurship to make a positive, sustainable impact. I’ve always wanted to help people and save the world. I turned to Industrial Organizational psychology as a way to help improve people’s lives in the place that affects us all — work. Likely as a reflection of the information I was seeking myself, I became very interested in understanding who people are, how they can leverage their identity and prepare early to maximize success. I gained this opportunity by joining IDEA. I started off as the People Ops Coordinator, and later became the Community & Ops Director in May. As I continued in my role, it felt like we could do more to prepare students and entrepreneurs to succeed. After all, entrepreneurship isn’t a job, but a lifestyle. I was determined to prepare my peers in practical ways traditional education regularly fails to. In pursuit of this mission I developed the Catalyst Class Series as my U.N. Fellowship project.
These 4 classes are designed to empower and educate the next generation of leaders, game-changers and innovators to positively impact the world around them. They are open to all MOSAIC students and ventures. Each class is 1 hour 30 minutes, half lecture and half group work. This helps cater to visual & hands on learners, as well as foster a sense of community.
Self Knowledge & Purposeful Planning (Spring 2020)
Who are you? Who do you aspire to be? What impact are you working to create in the world? How do you make a strategic plan towards that impact? How do you tell your story? Deciding what is important early in your career and gaining experiences like Co-op help refine your preferences. This is incredibly important starting off on the right foot. As you work to find your path, receiving guidance and developing a road map early on can make all the difference. This course will help you understand your personality and values, preferred working style, and where your tendencies will fit in the world to help drive impact.
Mental Health & Wellness (Monday, November 18th, IDEA Lab Hayden 001 6:00–7:30 pm)
Entrepreneurship is a chaotic battle with yourself and the world around you. Understanding your baseline mental health, your preferred work/life balance, and how to cope well are challenges in anyone’s life. Doing it in an environment where you must continually fail, adapt, and take significant risks is even more difficult. Facing struggles instead of pretending they don’t exist will create happier, stable & more confident innovators. This class is in partnership with Active Minds.
Social Impact (Thursday, November 14th, IDEA Lab Hayden 001 7:00-8:30pm)
In the MOSAIC entrepreneurship ecosystem, there is a unique opportunity to empower the next generation of business leaders to create good in the world. This course will center around social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, B-corps, and the competitive advantage social capital provides. It will teach entrepreneurs how to create sustainable social good through their business and support their customer communities. People and profit are not mutually exclusive, but often go hand in hand. This knowledge will drive founder’s future decisions and inspire them to contribute to society instead of growing at the cost of society.
Soft Skills (Tuesday, December 3rd, Dodge 130 6:00–7:30pm)
There is a soft skills drought in today’s talent marketplace. Traditional education has failed to catch up to this need, which means that others must fill in the blanks. Subject matter will be driven by studying what our alumni ventures wish they had learned in combination with insight into hiring needs. This ensures we provide the future with the abstract skills founders need to drive change, thrive and manage their companies. This specific class will be centered around relationship management, from mentors and co-founders to customers and subordinates.
Why is all of this important now? It takes ~66 days to build a habit. If you can learn how to live, balance your life, and shift your mindset, you save yourself more time and energy later. Compound all the missed negative consequences of sub-optimal habits and translate that into time you will spend happy, productive and helping others. This time could easily be the difference between an ordinary life and an extraordinary one. Do your future self a favor — start preparing now.
The United Nations Millennium Fellowship drives student leaders to create sustainable social change in their communities by building projects oriented around the Sustainable Development Goals. They were put into action to transform our world by 2030, tackling a variety of issues that go hand-in-hand to promote prosperity, build economic growth, and protect the planet. The Catalyst Class series drives SDG 9 — Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
You can sign up for the first three classes here:
