Found Jobzle, a new niche job site that helps families and other ‘casual employers’ find part-time workers and interns from a labor market composed of students.
Founders include some Brown University engineering students and and a computer science major at the University of Rhode Island. From the Jobzle.com site:
We created Jobzle because we believe that searching for a job, or searching for an employee, should be about making connections and finding the perfect fit – not about struggling through complicated websites full of features you don’t need.
Jobzle allows employers to quickly & inexpensively advertise part-time jobs and internships directly to college students. Whether you need a babysitter for the weekend or an intern for the office, Jobzle has you covered.
Looking forward to learning more about Jobzle and their approach. BTW, we recently posted on the upcoming 2011 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition (which will award nearly $200,000 to start ups in Rhode Island.)
Found an interesting article on student entrepreneurs when researching Under Armour founder Kevin Plank. This article, by Archana Rajan, highlights some of the actions that various colleges and universities (including the Smith School at the University of Maryland — where Plank studied) are doing to support and encourage student entrepreneurs.
While profiling Maryland Grad and CrookedMonkey T-Shirts founder Micha Weinblatt, Rajan writes,
Now 26 years old, Weinblatt owns a business that has booked more than $700,000 in sales during 2009. And he couldn’t have done it without the help he got from the University’s of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship–a business boot camp that helps students create, launch and grow their own companies.
College Hunks Hauling Junk is featured in the In Pictures: Dorm Room Entrepreneurs feature at Forbes.com
“The Dingman Center has been a tremendous source of advice for me, especially since I didn’t go to the business school,” says Weinblatt. Advice provided by the center taught him essential business skills, like how to forecast and monitor sales. It introduced him to a network of like-minded student entrepreneurs he could rely on for support and as a sounding board for new ideas. And it provided access to a network of successful entrepreneurs outside the school.
Weinblatt then describes his various interactions with Kevin Plank. From Rajan:
“During one of their meetings, Plank told him to concentrate on what the company does best; as a result, CrookedMonkey focused on its strength in the wholesale business, as opposed to selling directly to consumers over the Internet. Weinblatt says the advice helped the company succeed despite a recession.
Its great to hear that Dingman and Plank are available to students from across the campus and not just the business school. This is a sign of an open, diverse entrepreneurial eco-system on campus.
There are compelling statistics surrounding the growth of entrepreneurship centers and classes and many insights into the low-risk nature of founding a firm while on campus.
Other schools and programs mentioned include MIT, University of California Berkely, University of Pennsylvania, and Northeastern University.
Really solid post from Dr. Jeff Cornwall of Belmont University on whether more students were choosing entrepreneurship given the recent recession. There are some amazing things in his post given that Belmont is a small, private university and it underscores the importance of strong entrepreneurship programs with hands on faculty and effective entrepreneurship centers:
Each year we usually see about 15-20 new businesses started by our undergraduate students. Mind you, they do this in the midst of taking classes and often while also working part-time.
This year we have seen a tripling of new practicing student entrepreneurs. We went from 18 last year to 54 this year. Keep in mind that these students are not just our majors. They are coming from all across our campus from many different majors.
In my mind that is amazing. Read his entire post as it is well worth it and inspiring.
Campus Entrepreneurship 