A Chemist by Trade and Entrepreneur at Heart

Sarah Schneider might be a junior majoring in Chemistry at Princeton University, but as of now, she doesn’t have the traditional career goals of going to graduate or medical school nor spending her time in a research lab or big pharma company.

She instead rather spend her time developing her creativity, innovation, and design skills which she hopes, along with her chemistry knowledge, can be applied to build something amazing and produce a positive impact on the world.

Sarah was born and raised in New York and the first person in her high school to be accepted into Princeton University. She has a variety of interests including organic chemistry, entrepreneurship, and writing. She is currently pursuing three certificates at Princeton — 1) Entrepreneurship, 2) Engineering Biology, and 3) Material Science and Engineering.

Sarah is driven by the potential and impact she can have on an individual and communal level. She takes great pride in fostering relationships between individuals and creating a sense of community and culture. As a Peer Career Adviser and Community Action Leader, Sarah goes to great lengths to serve as a student leader and empower her peers to be their best selves.

These values of community building and empowerment transfer to her work in Princeton’s Entrepreneurship Club as an Officer of Company of Female Founders (COFF) and one of the Directors of ICE Network. COFF’s mission is to build a community that empowers females to pursue careers in entrepreneurship and innovation. With a tight-knit group of Princeton females, the Officers of COFF plans various events on campus including guest female speakers, student panels, and professor discussions to increase the presence of female voices on campus.

The Intercollegiate Entrepreneurship Network (ICE Network) is a cross-campus initiative that aims to enable and connect the next generation of innovators. At ICE, Sarah and her co-director manage a team of 15+ Princeton students who are part of the core ICE Network team and oversee the entire network consisting of 30 college entrepreneurship clubs. Sarah has helped expand the network internationally, adding a university from Rio, Brazil and Athens, Greece to the community. She has created a blog for ICE Network and revamped the internal structure of the Princeton ICE Network team to allow the group to take on more initiatives including a handbook for universities interested in creating an entrepreneurship club or culture on its campus, have two national conferences, create a monthly newsletter, and expand the recently created ICE Breaker Mini Series.

Over the summer, Sarah participated in the Princeton Startup Immersion Program (PSIP) in Tel Aviv, Israel for 10 weeks where she worked at a startup called Solomoto as a marketing intern. Additionally a friend and she will be working on a startup idea of their own beginning this fall which aims to connect college/freelance coders who are looking to develop their coding skills, grow their portfolio, and gain hands-on coding experience, to nonprofits and small to medium size businesses that need various front and back end coding projects to be completed efficiently and at a low cost.

This coming fall, Sarah will be forming an official team for the startup idea. If you are interested in being a part of the team, want to join or learn more about COFF or ICE Network, or have any questions, feel free to email Sarah at sarahns@princeton.edu.