Students in the sciences need to learn entrepreneurial skills

Arion replies: My thanks to Marc Levenson and Andres Peekna for taking interest in entrepreneurship education for physics. Permit me to restate a major theme in my article: Entrepreneurship education is not about startups, but rather about giving science students the skills, knowledge, and attitudes to be successful in their careers, whatever those might be.

Levenson’s comment about the need to provide those skills to all students is spot-on, and we in the entrepreneurship education community hope that this vision indeed comes to be. The upcoming American Physical Society conference “Reinventing the Physicist: Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education for the 21st Century” in June 2014 is a step in that direction (see http://www.aps.org/programs/education/conferences/innovation.cfm ). My article highlighted a few of the approaches that institutions are using to provide entrepreneurial skills training to physics students. Special degrees are only one option; the article also lists some of the other means by which the content can be brought to students. Methods of implementation are available to suit the particular circumstances, environment, student demographics, and desired outcomes of each institution and department.

Peekna apparently missed the main point of the article. Entrepreneurship education is not at all about channeling people into management, creating startups, or separating management careers and technical careers. It is about helping science students be successful in any position they may obtain, whether in academia, industry, or government. “Administrative duties,” as he puts them, are unavoidable, and entrepreneurship education will make them easier to handle while also preparing students to deal with and excel in the real world. A business major with a sampling of science courses will not prepare students well for a technical career; a science major with entrepreneurship content will. Having entrepreneurial skills and being a scientist are not mutually exclusive but mutually supportive.