In February 2025, Kushaan Vardhan — then a Georgetown University first-year — began developing the algorithm for Cerca, a dating app that allows people to set up mutual contacts, currently valued at $1.6 million. That same month, Vardhan started his transfer application to Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he currently attends.
Vardhan, who remains a computer science (CS) major at Columbia, said the lack of a formal engineering department and limited entrepreneurship resources at Georgetown prompted his transfer.
“It’s not a huge culture. You don’t see students thinking and talking and trying to develop within that field,” Vardhan told The Hoya.
“Because I’m in an engineering school now, I’m surrounded by tons of overachievers in the field,” Vardhan added.
Jeff Reid — who in 2009 founded Georgetown Entrepreneurship, a university-wide initiative that hosts pitch competitions and connects student entrepreneurs with funding and mentorship — said the program has a robust network of resources for student startups.
“We have a lot of things, and a lot of it is the experts that we bring — our network, entrepreneurs-in-residence, experts on call — all these people that want to help,” Reid told The Hoya.
Today, Georgetown Entrepreneurship engages over 2,000 students and 100 graduates annually. Georgetown startups have raised $9.6 billion in the last five years, and ventures from Bark Tank, Georgetown’s annual entrepreneurship competition, have raised over $220 million since the program’s launch in 2017.
The McDonough School of Business (MSB) also offers a minor in entrepreneurship and innovation for the common good, which requires students to engage in co-curricular activities offered by Georgetown Entrepreneurship.
A university spokesperson said Georgetown supports entrepreneurial students with this combination of academic and extracurricular initiatives.
“Georgetown University fosters entrepreneurship through academic programming as well as engagement opportunities open to all students, demonstrating its commitment to an innovative and entrepreneurial culture that provides support to faculty, students, staff and alumni,” the spokesperson wrote to The Hoya.
On the whole, the MSB is regularly ranked among the best business schools in the country. In 2025, U.S. News & World Report placed Georgetown 12th overall and 2nd in international business.
However, Georgetown’s entrepreneurship program has consistently lagged behind these departments.
That same year, Georgetown’s undergraduate entrepreneurship program did not rank among the top 36 nationally, while Indiana University Bloomington, a comparable business school, ranked 8th for business and 7th for entrepreneurship. University of Michigan ranked 4th for business and 3rd for entrepreneurship.
Georgetown students say the entrepreneurship program is limited by a lack of technical education and cultivated a culture of conformity.
Ty Swanson (CAS ’27) — founder of College Canine, a company that connects pet owners to local student caretakers — said Georgetown lags behind peer institutions in creating a unified ecosystem for student entrepreneurship.
“The entrepreneurship space at Georgetown is very fractured compared to other universities where they foster it,” Swanson told The Hoya.
Reid said the university needs more than mentorship structures to effectively support students.
“We need some vision to take that to a new level and organize it in different ways and make it really easy for a student or alum to show up and say, ‘Here’s what I’m trying to do, how can you help?’” Reid said.
“We do a lot already, but we’re going to do even more in the future,” Reid added.
Getting Down to Business
When Peter Mellen (CAS ’89, GRD ’98) started at Georgetown, he said there was no formal coursework or mentorship programs for students interested in entrepreneurship.
“I came to Georgetown wanting to be an entrepreneur, and there was literally nothing the university offered entrepreneurs,” Mellen told The Hoya. “Which I didn’t mind — I figured, ‘That’s fine, I’ll just make it up. It’s not really a subject anyway.’”
Marne Martin (SFS ’97) — the founder of Emburse, a platform that automates expense reporting and reimbursement — also said there was little institutional support for entrepreneurship.
“When I was in school in the ’90s it was more, ‘Some people are more entrepreneurial than others,’ and you kind of had to figure it out,’” Martin told The Hoya.
Since the founding of Georgetown Entrepreneurship, graduates have also established the Georgetown Angel Investor Network (GAIN) — a network that funds Georgetown-affiliated companies — and the entrepreneurs-in-residence program — a platform for students to receive one-on-one mentorship from industry professionals.
Martin said entrepreneurship education has also significantly expanded in the classroom.
“It’s been legitimized as an area of study and an area of teaching,” Martin said.
Reid, who is also the faculty director of the entrepreneurship minor, which was launched in 2018, said the program is only open to MSB students but he hopes to expand access to the minor in the future.
“I think we want to open the entrepreneurship minor to more students,” Reid said. “Right now, business majors can take it, and it’s grown 20% to 30% every year.”
“We know students like it when they hear about it, but a lot of students don’t know about it or are not currently eligible to take it,” Reid added. “So we want to grow that.”
For entrepreneurial students outside of the MSB, student organizations offer supplemental opportunities to explore the field.
Kendall Beil (MSB ’26) — chief executive officer of Georgetown Ventures (GV), a student-run startup accelerator — said the scope of the organization has significantly expanded during her tenure.
“We started as a club that only worked with student entrepreneurs here at Georgetown University and have very happily expanded to not only working with undergrad students but also with graduate students, MBAs, students in all facets of graduate programs here on campus, but also pulling founders who are outside of the Georgetown University ecosystem,” Beil told The Hoya.
Despite this progress, Reed Uhlik (CAS ’25) said Georgetown’s curriculum remains insufficient.
“There is a gap between what theory you learn in a classroom and what skills/knowledge you need to use industry tools/technologies,” Uhlik wrote to The Hoya.
In Technical Terms
For student entrepreneurs, Georgetown’s limited computer science programs and nonexistent engineering programs pose a significant barrier to success.
Michigan ranks 14th nationally in undergraduate computer science, while Georgetown, by contrast, ranks 24th.
In the last three graduating classes, Georgetown has graduated between 80 and 85 computer science majors or minors each year, around 4% of its graduating student body.
In the 2024-2025 academic school year, Michigan granted 1,666 computer science and engineering undergraduate degrees, around 19% of its graduating student body.
Students like Vardhan say Georgetown’s entrepreneurial scene is still lacking a technical backbone of students who can code.
“At Georgetown, students are overachievers overall. They really do amazing things,” Vardhan said. “If you just can turn them in that direction of computer science, they would continue to do those phenomenal things in that field as well.”
Uhlik said this progress requires the university to provide a more robust technical education.
“This could be expanding clubs that give startup experience on the technical front, more electives focused on tech used in-industry or more structured guidance and focus on supporting students through tech recruiting,” Uhlik wrote.
Lisa Singh, the chair of the department of computer science, said the program takes an interdisciplinary approach in teaching students, offering additional programming in ethics and law.
“Our goal is ultimately to engage students in understanding the basic principles of the field of computer science, so should they decide to pursue a career in computer science, they have all the foundational knowledge they need to be successful in the field,” Singh told The Hoya. “At the same time, we actually believe that in the world we live in now, we can’t think about computer science in isolation.”
Despite technological advances, some students say Georgetown’s computer science department does not accommodate students’ varied skill levels.
Vardhan said the department, which does not accept Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate credits, requires students with varying levels of experience to follow the same track, limiting opportunities for more advanced students.
“There’s no way to accelerate the process in CS,” Vardhan said. “These kinds of credits don’t transfer. You can’t really take place-out exams, so you’re kind of stuck taking it from the beginning, which, for students who have potential, deters them from wanting to come to Georgetown because there’s no point repeating those skills.”
While the department offers some opportunities to test out of introductory classes, Singh said they are largely limited.
“We do have certain types of placement, but it’s very restrictive and you have to show a certain competency to place out,” Singh said.
As a result of Georgetown’s limited technical education, Sara Medina (SOH ’27), a student associate for Georgetown Entrepreneurship, said Georgetown entrepreneurs face the unique challenge of finding software engineers, unlike at schools with large computer science programs such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University.
“It’s hard, if you have an idea, for you to find someone else who can build that idea,” Medina told The Hoya. “For example, at Stanford, MIT, if you go to the next dorm room, there’s someone coding in there. It’s just a different culture.”
“I think engineering is a big part of it because those are the implementers, those are people who can build out something if you have an idea,” Medina added.
Student organizations play an integral role in filling these gaps, offering students the opportunity to learn outside the classroom.
Jayk Chen (CAS ’28) — director of education for Product Space, a product management club — said the group supplements in-classroom experiences by teaching their members, prospective project managers (PMs), a limited technical curriculum, including application programming interface (API), a set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other.
“A unit in our fellowship training is about the basics of technical foundations you might need as a PM,” Chen told The Hoya. “What is an API? How does the Internet work? What are typical structures for apps in terms of how they store their data?”
Swanson — who is also chief analytics officer of Hoyalytics, a data science and consulting club at Georgetown — said, compared to formal classroom education, clubs like Hoyalytics have more robust training programs focused on essential skills like practicality and output.
“If I ask someone that’s taking the training, ‘When would I use this in a real project or real life?’ that answer is always top of mind,” Swanson said. “Whereas, if you go to an intro-level computer science class, that through line is less obvious.”
While technical education is scarce, Chen said Georgetown also suffers from a lack of imagination that dampens the entrepreneurial culture.
“I think it is hard for a lot of Georgetown students to imagine building a product that would be a Silicon Valley startup,” Chen said. “I think there’s probably more interest in working at them but maybe not becoming a valley.”
A Culture of Convention
Despite entrepreneurial interest at the undergraduate level, many students do not see entrepreneurship as a viable career post-graduation.
Stella Millspaugh (MSB ’27), GV’s director of external relations, said student interest in more conventional career paths, like consulting and investment banking, is driven by Georgetown’s risk-averse culture.
“Every year, I think more and more people go into investment banking,” Millspaugh told The Hoya. “I honestly think that’s a valid trend happening with immediate graduates or people recruiting for their junior year internship. I don’t think that’s the fault of opportunities not being shown to them. I think it’s the fault of the entire push to all do the same thing.”
Neel Sadda (CAS ’25) — co-founder of Racquet Theory, a multimedia tennis platform that tied for 3rd place at Bark Tank this year — said he would pursue a career in banking post-graduation.
“I made the decision that most people do — that finance, consulting seems like a more intelligent way to start your career,” Sadda told The Hoya. “It doesn’t mean you need to spend your life there, but at least it gives you more optionality.”
This emphasis on more traditional careers is reflected in Georgetown’s club culture.
Vardhan said GV fosters a culture of entrepreneurship at Georgetown, but it still approaches the subject from a consulting perspective.
“I think the closest thing is GV, but even then, we’re talking about it from a consulting angle,” Vardhan said. “We’re still not talking about it from a developing and a founders’ perspective.”
Chen said students consistently choose careers in consulting and investment banking simply because those are what the business school is known for.
“There is still going to be a big disparity in Georgetown, especially just because of how strong those pathways are,” Chen said.
Unlike the lofty salaries and job security these careers provide, Rush Beesley (MSB ’28) said entrepreneurial careers are inherently risk-prone.
“Even for startups, most students consider a few years in consulting or banking first to be the ‘safe’ option,” Beesley said.
However, Swanson said that while Hoyalytics is a consulting club, it still has a strong entrepreneurial spirit.
“Our training is fundamentally built on the idea that every class has to get you closer to the output because we don’t have that long with you,” Swanson said. “I think that mentality is something that I’ve seen a lot in the entrepreneurship spaces that I’ve been involved in myself.”
Still, Swanson said the university doesn’t foster the curiosity necessary for entrepreneurship.
“Curiosity — I think that’s what a lot of members and students in these clubs have that really isn’t well fostered by the university environment,” Swanson said. “But it is very well supplemented by the club environment.”
Today, 74% of MSB students pursue these traditional career paths after graduation.
Reid said this focus on consulting and banking challenges long-term interest in entrepreneurship.
“I still think the culture here is that students want to go to a steady job,” Reid said. “They want to take blue-chip banking or consulting. That’s the biggest challenge we have — students don’t always open their eyes to see all the other opportunities.”
Despite the allure of these traditional paths, Vardhan is set on pursuing his own ventures.
While he still cares deeply about the school, Vardhan said Georgetown doesn’t offer the development opportunities he needs.
“I would love nothing more than for Georgetown entrepreneurship and computer science to grow,” Vardhan said. “I still have a huge affinity for the school.”
“I’m a Hoya for life,” Vardhan added. “If I can make something of myself here, I’ll definitely be giving back to Georgetown.”
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