Jul 18, 2022 By: lberlinger
Earlier this year, Dr. Noam Wasserman, dean of the Sy Syms School of Business, had a unique opportunity to extend one of the four pillars of YU, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, to a college in Africa.
Davis College in Rwanda reached out to Dr. Wasserman through the Make It Real Foundation (MIRF), whose CEO, Isaac Wolman, is a good friend of YU. MIRF is also a client of this summer’s YU Consulting Force, employing two interns who are helping them develop a career mentorship program for refugees.
Members of the faculty at Davis asked Dr. Wasserman if he could advise them about curriculum design and if he would do a model “Founder’s Dilemmas” session with some business students. His response was a resounding, “Of course!”
The first session took place in February with their entrepreneurship faculty and tapped materials that Dean Wasserman used to teach to other professors when he was at Harvard Business School and teaches now to the faculty at Sy Syms: How to design a curriculum, how to teach it using the most effective methods, and how to develop your career as a professor. The topics included:
- The three core building blocks of an entrepreneurship curriculum.
- The best student-centered teaching methods to convey each of those building blocks (including tapping into the Talmud for insights from Rabbi Chanina’s student-centric teaching approach).
- How the faculty should think about their own career development, blending together their research and teaching into a powerful reinforcing system.
- The biggest reason for failure among high-potential startups.
- Preparing Yourself to Found (also the topic of the first episode of the new podcast he is co-hosting with Charlie Harary).
- The most important early dilemmas faced by founding teams—the 3Rs of Relationship dilemmas, Roles and Decision-Making dilemmas, and Rewards dilemmas.