Sherman Center Co-ops Create Opportunities for Young Entrepreneurs
A co-op program at Northeastern’s Sherman Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship allows undergraduate and graduate students to spend their co-op cycle developing and managing a business. The program provides students with professional development opportunities, and it has launched multiple successful enterprises.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Erin Kayata. Main photo: Students work in the Michael J. and Ann Sherman Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship which offers co-ops for student entrepreneurs. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Budding entrepreneurs flourish in Northeastern’s Sherman Center full-time co-op program
When Madison Rifkin was 12, she came up with the idea for a bike with a lock built into its frame so riders wouldn’t have to worry about forgetting one. She received a patent for the device and came to Northeastern and minored in engineering with the goal to learn how to build this lock.
But as with any business, Rifkin’s venture, Mount, evolved over time from a bike lock into a scooter lock into a travel app to help people find hidden gems, one that she runs today full time. Luckily, she had the time, space and funding to explore these avenues through the Sherman Venture co-op.
The Sherman Venture co-op allows budding entrepreneurs at Northeastern University the chance to work on a new or existing business idea full time. The six-month, paid co-op is offered through the Michael J. and Ann Sherman Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship to undergraduate and graduate students with a business concept that’ll address a specific market need.
Several students are chosen each semester to spend all their time working on whatever they determine to be their business needs.
“The (Sherman Venture Co-op) showed me what it was going to be like to work for myself,” Rifkin said. “It allowed me to test that out before the stakes were a lot higher post-graduation (and) to really learn how to be my own boss, manage my own time and get to a place where this startup could be operational full time. The Sherman Venture co-op allowed for all of that trial and error.”
Students in the co-op are able to spend their day not just working on their products, but taking meetings and working in their market. This means some students spend the semester outside Boston depending on what works for their venture.
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Students at the Michael J. and Ann Sherman Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship have access to engineering resources including the Sherman Venture co-op. Photos by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Jack Burns, a current Sherman Venture co-op and fourth-year business administration student, is spending his semester in Milwaukee working on Ketchup, Please, a company he co-founded in 2019 with his friend Evan Lampsa. The company’s mission is “to foster a healthier and happier America, one bottle of ketchup at a time.”
Ketchup, Please has two versions of ketchup that are sold in 400 retailers in the Midwest.
“Being based in Wisconsin and where all of our retailers are is really helpful,” Burns said. “To be able to travel within your home market has been really great. A lot of us were already doing this before the co-op, so it’s really allowed us to take a step back from those other responsibilities, really dive in full time to our own ventures, and seeing where we can take it.”
Not every venture has to be a traditional business. Some are, like Burns or Ashleigh Chiwaya and Naomi Barrant, third-year students currently on the Venture co-op and working on creating a vending machine that sells products for students with curly or coily hair that often aren’t available in other local stores. But Join Cheng, a third-year music industry and communications studies student, is spending his co-op working on his music career.
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