Hearst Mining Circle, UC Berkeley

As my Startup Semester journey at Berkeley comes to an end, there are plenty of useful lessons and experiences I reflect upon as I write this article. Three of my courses, namely Product Management, Blockchain and Technology Entrepreneurship had similar stages – brainstorming an idea, performing validation, and prototyping among others. As part of the program, there also was a design bootcamp, and some of the aforementioned stages overlapped with concepts covered in the latter. For instance, conducting user interviews and focusing on user satisfaction were highly essential concepts in both entrepreneurship and design thinking.

UC Berkeley is a melting pot of people from different countries. Interacting with people having diverse backgrounds in terms of culture made me notice varieties of ideas they could bring to discussions. This made me realize that even though there may be hundreds of students pursuing a particular field, say product design, for instance, they would propose widely and wonderfully different approaches to solving that problem.
This aspect of varied varied exposure is perhaps the best and most interesting part of my student experience at Berkeley.

Looking back, I also reflect on how the entrepreneurial growth mindset changed my way of learning. I feel I now possess a renewed approach to learning about other fields, and how to learn positively about topics I may even dislike! Specifically, the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship (BMoE), in my opinion, is a highly effective way for those wishing to make a societal impact. For example, every project-based course embracing BMoE encourages user interviews – this helps in the better evolution of a product through understanding and incorporating a wide variety of user perspectives.

In conclusion, I would add that apart from having moments at Berkeley that would always be memorable, I cannot express sufficiently in a single blog post how useful the Startup Semester has been to me. This program strikes a fine balance between obtaining both academic and industry insights, with entrepreneurship as a foundation. If you’re a student wishing to make an impact on society and see the Startup Semester opportunity coming your way, don’t hesitate to take it!