StartupCafe

Every year, the Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE) places a few keen students in every higher education institution in Scotland to discuss and promote entrepreneurship amongst the student community. The 40ish strong team markets the services and events offered by the Universities and SIE such as mentoring, workshops, competitions, talks, and other seminars.

At the University of Edinburgh, Launch.Ed, EPIS, Informatics Ventures are some of the departments helping students who need support to start their own venture. The interns work directly with Launch.Ed and closely with the other groups. With the University being divided into three different Colleges, each intern focused his work on one of them: the College of Humanities and Social Sciences whose intern is Hilary Singer, the College of Science and Engineering whose intern was Jeremy Klar and the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine I was looking after.

This year, SIE organised three summits: one in Edinburgh, one in Glasgow, and one in Aberdeen. These are annual events where all students are invited, and are given the opportunity to listen and learn from some incredibly experienced entrepreneurs. The events are meant to be inspiring, and aim at making students think about what they could do themselves. Past speakers include Gordon Richardson (Bean Scene), Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair’s government director of communications and strategy), Jacqueline Gold (Ann Summers), etc.

As interns, our work usually involves listening to students discuss their ideas, their dreams, etc. We then get them to think at these ideas more seriously, and direct them to one of the business mentors. The service is offered by the University and SIE, and it is entirely free. These business mentors then support these students until they are able to fly with their own wings, usually a few years later when the venture is successful.