This past summer, Crown College debuted its Innovation and Entrepreneurship Pathway through Summer Session. Designed to provide students with transferable skills for today’s job market, including project management, teamwork and leadership skills. Students gain experience in key areas such as designing business plans and developing marketing strategies while engaging with real-world challenges. With UC Santa Cruz located just over the hill from Silicon Valley’s thriving tech scene, the university is uniquely positioned to develop the entrepreneurial mindset of its students.
The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Pathway is open to UC Santa Cruz students, students from other UC campuses, and visiting students. The pathway offers flexibility—participants can enroll in individual summer courses or complete the entire series to earn formal recognition. UC Santa Cruz students can complete the courses during the summer or spread them across additional fall, winter, and spring quarters. Visiting summer-only students can complete them in one or multiple summers.
Students in the pathway create business proposals, design websites, and learn the basics of start-ups while working closely with experienced entrepreneurs. By the end, they gain practical skills to succeed in high-growth industries or launch their own entrepreneurial ventures.
This year, the pathway celebrates its first Summer Session graduate Shruti Kale, a business management economics major with a minor in technology information management systems. Shruti reflects on her experiences in the Q&A below.
What inspired you to complete the I&E Pathway?
I first heard about this pathway from SCEE at the beginning of my first quarter at UCSC. I was informed that by completing additional classes under the I&E Pathway program, I would focus on entrepreneurship and receive entrepreneurial recognition at graduation. I was excited to hear this, as I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit—learning more about the world of startups, inspiring ideas, and success stories would only motivate me further. My expectations when starting this program were high—I wanted to learn about the specific methods that successful entrepreneurs have used in the past to start, grow, and scale their businesses.
Did the pathway meet your expectations?
This pathway surpassed my expectations—not only did I learn about new businesses and how they come to be through the Lean Start-Up method, I also learned how to hash out ideas and see what's feasible through the business model canvas that we used to build our ideas through Innovation Within. I met like-minded students and explored the process of creating a business from scratch.
What was the most valuable or useful aspect?
The most valuable part isn't a material item; it's the lessons in entrepreneurship I took with me. I truly believe that entrepreneurship is something you can apply to any field, career, or industry. If you can identify and solve problems, as well as impact lives around you through your ideas, that in itself is a huge accomplishment. Even if I had only taken away the entrepreneurial and growth mindsets, that would have been substantial as well. A pathway like this doesn't just help you learn and grow—it gives you a new perspective and mindset when approaching everyday life. An entrepreneur needs to be resilient, optimistic, and always find opportunities to grow and progress. This lesson can help us all in any field, and the I&E pathway opens up the world of entrepreneurship for you.
What was your favorite class or activity during the program?
In the Start-up Entrepreneurship Academy, we had to create a business model canvas and explore problems and solutions over the course of the quarter. Essentially, we were divided into small groups based on ideas for businesses that solve problems at UCSC and beyond. We pitched our business every class and improved and tailored our ideas each time, based on feedback and constructive criticism from the class. At the end of the quarter, we had a final presentation where everyone pitched their business to the rest of the class and even had the opportunity to apply to the SC Launchpad or Slug Tank, the largest pitch competition at UCSC. From the beginning to the end of the quarter, it was inspiring to see each team's ideas grow and take shape into their final products. Hearing about everyone's development of their ideas—tailoring their business to customer needs, making it monetizable, thinking about scaling, exploring partnerships, and even collaborations with other companies—was a rewarding experience. It truly felt like we went through the process of creating a fully functional and operating business, and I saw how attached we had become to growing all our ideas. After that last class, I think we all left with a sense of inspiration like no other.
