I worked on the Tamer Institute's Startup Works program, where I revamped the curriculum ahead of our third iteration in spring 2025. During this internship, I worked closely with the founder of the program, Chankrit Sethi '23, and Tamer Institute Managing Director, Sandra Navalli '03, to redesign the core themes of the workshops and create new and exciting exercises for the participants. As a result of this work, the incoming student instructors will have a comprehensive guide for teaching this course in the spring that they can use to customize parts of the workshop series to best fit their teaching and facilitation style. The teaching guide has flexibility that each instructor can pull from their own experience and expertise. An additional result is the workbook I created. Every participant will receive a comprehensive workbook at the start of the workshop series that contains the readings, workshop exercises, and resources that they will need for the entire six-week workshop series. This new material will hopefully streamline the participant’s experience and the administrative lift on the Tamer Institute team.

Throughout my internship, I relied on my entrepreneurial training and education to design a curriculum that would set up the participants for success. I leaned on the management and entrepreneurial classes that I took throughout my MBA experience to think about what cases, examples, and reading material had the greatest impact in comprehension of the core material and recall months after class. It was important to me that all participants who came through the Startup Work experience left with a baseline level knowledge of the key aspects for starting a business, as many may want to start one at some point in their lives. Selecting the correct readings and in-class exercises are a critical part of ensuring a democratization of knowledge.

While working through the curriculum design, I faced a challenge well known to most instructors. With only six workshop sessions, I had to think critically about the information taught, and content that could be accessed through self-directed learning through Columbia Business School (CBS), or publicly available online. The Startup Works population is unique because the workshop series is open to anyone regardless of education background and work experience. While this is what makes the program special, it also poses an interesting challenge to the instructor and course design. It was important to me that every participant left the workshop series with a basic understanding of each step of starting a business.

From this experience I became more deeply committed to my passion for mentoring and educating startups and small businesses. I want to stay connected to the Tamer Institute, and more specifically with Startup Works. For the next cohort of Startup Works I plan to be involved as an advisor so I can continue to give advice and help teams pursue their startups. I also believe that the teaching and facilitation that takes place within the Startup Works and REAP programs goes beyond business education and gives students the chance to interact with people who have a different background. Each interaction teaches me more about our society and where it falls short of helping certain communities, leaving me emboldened to search for novel solutions to bring equity to marginalized groups.