Was there anything you felt was missing at ETH?
Meier
: I would like to see even more scope for entrepreneurial activities in all the academic departments along with appropriate recognition in the form of credits, just like the focus projects in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering. I worked with other students to develop the Pixhawk drone software alongside my Master’s degree. I succeeded in the end, but that double workload was pretty extreme and I was sometimes on the verge of failure.
So how did you manage to keep your entrepreneurial streak alive?
Meier
: I was simply determined to build a flying robot! But I faced a lot of problems at first because the study programme in my department didn’t envisage that kind of project at all. In the end I somehow managed to work around this. When I realised, eventually, that I couldn’t achieve what I wanted on my own, a combination of semester papers, Bachelor’s dissertations and Master’s theses proved to be the solution. I ended up putting together a team of students who were two years older than me. I was fortunate that my professor was willing to go along with it!
Sartori
: One of my best experiences during my studies was the focus project in the engineering department. That was when I set up the Formula Student team with five other students. There were plenty of credits, but we had to work incredibly hard. Some of the team, including me, added on an extra semester. But it was certainly worth it in the end. Employers have always acknowledged the value of that hands-on experience and now, as an employer myself, I also find myself looking for candidates with that kind of experience.
Springman
: Some of the academic departments are more progressive than others when it comes to such projects. We received feedback from students in one of the recent rounds of the ETH+ initiative, asking for more multidisciplinary projects in our Bachelor’s degree programmes. Maybe we can start a pilot project soon with two or three departments. A few years ago we developed ETH Week, an event where we bring together some 200 students from all academic departments to work on an important global problem. And soon we’ll be kicking off our ETH Month programme in Singapore, a correspondingly longer version of ETH Week that also allows students to gain credits.
ETH runs special programmes to promote entrepreneurship. Which did you benefit from most?
Meier
: I was a faithful ETH student so I was allowed to take advantage of almost all the programmes, including an Excellence Scholarship, Pioneer Fellowships and so on! The Pioneer Fellowships programme is very well positioned to take students with the right technical aptitude into the wider world of industry and a start-up career. Nevertheless, I still think that ETH needs to slightly rethink its spin-off policy. It’s obviously great that 95 percent of spin-offs are still in business five years later, but that also means that many of them tend to stay small, far short of a Google or Facebook. In terms of international competitiveness, preference should be given to creating a few larger companies that have the potential to become global market leaders. That’s something that doesn’t happen often enough here.
What would be a better way to achieve that in your opinion?
Sartori
: American universities focus on nurturing the winners, the ones they think could become really big. They don’t spend time on average potential. They end up with role models that offer real inspiration to students.
