Business student embraces the entrepreneurial spirit
Kate Murdock’s short-term professional goal is to work for a startup consulting firm, a position for which her qualifications run deep.
Murdock, DMSB’18, is an investment analyst for IDEA: Northeastern’s student-run venture accelerator, and the senior director of the Entrepreneurship Immersion program, the brainchild of the Northeastern Entrepreneurs Club. She is a marketing intern for the New England Venture Capital Association, whose mission is to promote regional entrepreneurship, and the former brand manager for Bare Tree Media, the virtual branding startup.
And that’s not all: Last month, Murdock was selected to work for the investment team of Dorm Room Fund Boston, a student-run venture firm that invests in student-run startups. Her job responsibilities include vetting new ventures, planning events, and blogging.
“Working closely with startups will give me an in-depth look at the triumphs and tribulations of startup life,” says Murdock, when asked to explain how her new position dovetails with her career ambitions. “It will expose me to all kinds of working road-blocks and allow me to figure out how I would go about helping companies accomplish their goals.”
Dorm Room Fund is backed by First Round Capital, the seed-stage venture firm that launched the program in Philadelphia in 2012. Since then, the program has expanded to Boston, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay area, where teams of students have worked to help their peers take their ideas from the dorm room to the market.
Murdock, a second-year international business major, is one of 12 students on the Boston-based investment team, which includes young decision-makers from Harvard University, Tufts University, Boston University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the past year, the team has doled out $20,000 to several college-based startups, including Grove Labs, the aquaculture company, and LovePop, the 3D greeting card company.
“The city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is important to me,” Murdock says, “and I value the Dorm Room Fund’s mission of fostering the entrepreneurial spirit on college campuses.”
Murdock, for her part, has quickly become one of the key members of Northeastern’s thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, which includes student clubs, mentor groups, university centers, and external investor networks.
Her ongoing work with IDEA and the Entrepreneurs Club, she says, has taught her a valuable life-lesson, one that could be applied to any endeavor. “One of the most important things that I’ve learned from my experiential learning opportunities is that hard work and the willingness to put everything into what you’re doing will get you anywhere you want to go,” she explains. “Working in entrepreneurship taught me to be driven, to be dedicated, and to persevere.”