Initiatives
We plan various conferences, panels, and other events both on and off campus to empower the entrepreneurial spirit of the Columbia community
Global Tech Treks
The Global Tech Treks team expands CORE’s horizons across the globe. Whether we're organizing our annual Spring Break Global Tech Treks or hosting foreign exchange students in NYC for some of our larger conferences, we focus on exploring what entrepreneurship means abroad and from a global perspective. In the past, we visited London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Shanghai.
STARTUP COLUMBIA
The Startup Columbia and Columbia Venture Competition team collaborates with Columbia Entrepreneurship and Columbia University’s undergraduate schools to showcase the breadth of entrepreneurship at Columbia. We run the annual Startup Columbia entrepreneurship festival and coordinate the Undergraduate Challenge of the $250,000 Columbia Venture Competition.
ALMAWORKS
The Almaworks team helps student founders in the Columbia community launch successful companies by providing the resources and support that allow student entrepreneurs to go from zero to a hundred. Almaworks, our flagship initiative and Columbia’s first and only student-run accelerator program, has supported 45 Columbia startups that have won major pitch competitions, advanced to prestigious incubator programs, and gone on to raise over $12 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, TechStars, and others.
PARTNERSHIPS
CORE has partnerships to support other campus organization. Programs include Jumpstarting Aspiring Developers and Entrepreneurs (JADE), a week-long immersive winter-break program for first-year students in the NYC startup ecosystem. The Startup Internship program allows interns to take part in educational programming in the startup industry. Additionally, EVE (Entrepreneurship via Exploration) provides an immersive introduction to entrepreneurship in NYC for first year students.
Enterprises
The Enterprises team helps students at Columbia become acquainted and comfortable with entrepreneurship through a 9-week course taught by CORE members and entrepreneurs in our community. The Enterprises team builds the semester’s curriculum and leads each weekly session. Through peer-led discussions and group activities, students of Enterprises learn about float analysis, customer discovery techniques, market analysis, product development, vesting, and venture capital. The results are a better knowledge of entrepreneurship at Columbia and beyond, a working pitch deck on an idea, and a diverse network of entrepreneurs formed over 9 weeks.
High school initiatives
CORE Youth works to expose high school students to the world of social entrepreneurship via conferences, workshops, and after-school programs. In our rapidly changing society, CORE Youth seeks to introduce high school students to entrepreneurial thinking and problem solving by having students ideate and present their own social startup ventures. CORE Youth works extensively with the Columbia University Double Discovery Center and Columbia Global Centers to reach youths from various backgrounds.
Impulse
CORE Impulse fosters a community of writers exploring the intersection between entrepreneurship and journalism. Over the course of 6 weeks, Impulse cohorts speak to founders, students, and other players in the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Columbia and NYC.
[email protected]
[email protected] is a community of female CORE members who seek a casual place to organize events, discuss their experiences as entrepreneurs, and get to know one another better. [email protected] has bi-monthly meetings at coffee shops around campus and occasionally hosts speaking events centered around females in entrepreneurship.
DESIGNATHON
The annual Blueprint Designathon is a day-long human-centered design challenge centered around design thinking for social impact. In collaboration with Barnard-Columbia Design for America, the Designathon introduces students to human-centered design via an immersive day of workshops, user interviews, and prototyping.