Student group helps aspiring entrepreneurs kick-start careers
Students at Texas Tech University interested in becoming entrepreneurs ventured into new territory during the 2014-15 school year with the creation of the Media Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group.
Geoffrey Graybeal, Ph.D., currently serves as the faculty adviser for MEIG and is the mastermind behind the College of Media & Communication’s newest student organization.
Graybeal is in his second year as an assistant professor of Media Strategies in CoMC. He teaches both Professional Communication, a public speaking class tailored for electronic media and communications majors, and Media Economics & Entrepreneurship, the capstone course for media strategies majors.
The MEIG group was founded in the fall of 2014, and Graybeal describes it as a resource for students to be involved in with entrepreneurial endeavors.
Graybeal said that one of the main reasons there was a need for a group like MEIG was because Texas Tech students were looking for a way to further develop the ideas they created in classes such as his Media Economics & Entrepreneurship class.
“We wanted an outlet and an avenue for students with entrepreneurial ideas that was not just limited to media strategies majors,” Graybeal said. “We wanted to create interdisciplinary teams of students from around the university.”
Benjamin Jarvis (BA Media Strategies, 2014, and MA Mass Communications, 2015), the former president of MEIG, said he hopes the group can help “develop student ideas into disruptive media businesses.”
MEIG was formed around the acronym COINS, which stands for “competitions, organizing, innovating, networking, and startups.” In order to help students strengthen and polish their ideas, Graybeal found competitive outlets such as the Student Startup Madness competition.
Three teams from Texas Tech were among the 150 that entered the third annual Student Startup Madness competition in January. All three entries from Texas Tech made it to the final 64. And one of the teams, Crawlr, made it to the final 32.
“I’m very happy and pleased that they made it to the field of 32,” Graybeal said. “We are kind of the underdog in the sense that we are a new program and others are more established and have more resources. But as you can see with the Student Startup Madness entries, our students can compete with anybody.”
Crawlr, a music discovery app that notifies users when their favorite bands are playing nearby, is a product that was developed by a group of students from Graybeal’s Media Economics & Entrepreneurship class in fall 2014.
In the class, students were assigned to groups of five and had to choose an idea to develop throughout the semester. They created a business model for their idea, asking questions such as, “How are we going to make money?” and “Who is our target audience?”
We wanted an outlet and an avenue for students with entrepreneurial ideas that was not just limited to media strategies majors. We wanted to create interdisciplinary teams of students from around the university.
- Geoffrey Graybeal, Ph.D.
By the end of the semester, the students created a business plan and a viable prototype for their idea. As the professor for the class, Graybeal said his focus was on teaching students how to develop an idea in a team format and on teaching them how to pitch their idea to investors.
Wesley Metter (BA Media Strategies, 2015) said that while Texas Tech is the underdog, she hopes students from MEIG can draw attention to the university and can represent it well at competitions.
Another competition MEIG entered in the spring of 2015 is the Scripps International Innovators Cup, which has a grand prize of $5,000. This challenge was first launched at Ohio University as the Scripps Innovation Challenge, and this is the first year it is open to other universities. Ohio University won the competition.
Graybeal explained that the Scripps competition has very specific challenges that relate to today’s audience. For example, this year’s event challenges students to develop a product that will answer the question, “How do you engage millennial voters in the 2016 presidential election?”
Metter said she hopes that the group can use the competitions to help students strengthen their entrepreneurial ideas.
“Everyone has great ideas, but not everyone really knows what to do with them once you’ve thought of them. This is where our group helps,” Metter said. “We help students take their ideas from concept to creation, and during the process there are a lot of business-like aspects involved.”
Jarvis said, “MEIG has helped me make some great networking connections within the student body of the university and with alumni. I think that the one thing that I’ve learned since the start of the organization is that media startups can be as small as a new way to share a photo or as big as Facebook.”
Graybeal said he is pleased with the developments. He described his ultimate goal for students as helping them turn their ideas into companies.
“I’m very happy with the success and the progress that students have made this year,” Graybeal said. “This is just the first year and the timing is really right for everything. Not just with our college’s efforts, but across the university.” mc
(Rachel Blevins is a sophomore journalism major from Mineral Wells, Texas. Jay Crain is a senior electronic media and communications major from De Kalb, Texas.)
