ESS 610: SCET & BEGIN

Laura Vogt:
Hello, and welcome to The Not So Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host Laura Vogt. I’m the associate director for marketing communications for the College of Engineering. And this week’s resource highlight is a two for one, both of which I don’t know very much about. So thank you, Keith McAleer for joining us today to tell us about the Sutardja Center for… Oh, I’m going to mess this up. The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, or SCET, and the Berkeley Gateway to Innovation, or BEGIN. So Keith, thank you so much for being here today.

Keith McAleer:
Oh, thank you, Laura, for having us. And I think you pronounced it perfectly.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, thank you. You can tell I’m talking too fast, I’ll tumble over words.

Keith McAleer:
There’s a lot of words. Yeah.

Laura Vogt:
So let’s start off with you telling us a little bit more about yourself and what your role is for the College of Engineering.

Keith McAleer:
Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So my name’s Keith McAleer and I worked at, as you mentioned, The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology which is a center in the College of Engineering. So at the SCET I work on marketing, similar to you. So I am essentially helping to manage websites, write communications and help connect students with all of our various programs that we have.

Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much. So now that we’ve already established that I don’t know very much about the programs that you work for let’s start up with SCET. There’s so many different elements to it, so I’m excited to learn about them. So can you tell us more about the program and what its schools are?

Keith McAleer:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad to have the opportunity to talk about this. Our center is very active. We started in 2005 with the idea that engineers would benefit from having some more innovation and entrepreneurship skills. We are aa technology entrepreneurship center so we do focus a bit more on tech. And our goal is to empower innovators to positively changed the world. Our main audience is, of course, engineering students, Berkeley students. So we have a lot of programs for Berkeley students. These programs include our classes, which every semester we have about 15 or so courses for students that help them learn the entrepreneurial mindsets, help them gain innovation skills. So you can learn how to be more innovative with your project. In many of our courses you do create a venture project. So you do have the chance to actually create a startup. But also, many students learn these skills and take them into industry, into big companies as well. So our goal really is to help students understand innovation, learn the entrepreneurial mindset, and be able to have the ability this field to innovate themselves.

Keith McAleer:
Beyond Berkeley students of course, we also have other programs. We work with professionals in Silicon Valley and around the world and help them learn leadership and innovation skills as well. We also have innovation labs, we call X-Labs that are doing research around innovation, entrepreneurship, and also in different areas that are very emerging in innovation right now, such as with meat alternatives and blockchain and disaster, which we will, I think, talk about a little later. And also we have global programs. So one of our kind of beliefs is that we will be better at creating innovation if we can get different kinds of people to come together to create innovative products, innovative solutions. So we bring students here from around the world, academics, people from industry, all to come here to the Bay Area and to Berkeley because they want to be a part of Berkeley. They want to see what’s happening here. And then helps our programs have more diverse people with different perspectives.

Laura Vogt:
You said that the programs are open to Berkeley students, is that undergrads and grads?

Keith McAleer:
Yeah, definitely our programs are open to all students on campus, essentially. So that’s undergrads, that’s grads. Our classes are open to all majors on campus. So we are College of Engineering entity, but as I kind of just mentioned we need different types of people to create the most innovative products and teams. So we have students from every major on campus, every college. In fact, I think College of Letters and Science, we have maybe more students from them than any other college, including many from of course data science and computer science. But really our goal is to get as many majors involved as possible and then bring them into this engineering world to give them exposure to engineers, get used to working with engineers and have the chance to create these more innovative products and solutions.

Laura Vogt:
And our podcast is going to air on Monday the 22nd and so students are starting classes in the couple of days. Are there still classes available that students could register or to look up?

Keith McAleer:
Yes. I definitely just check today because I wanted to make sure to give the right info. And as of today on this recording of the podcast, we have three courses that do have some availability. So the classes do fill up pretty quickly, but we have actually two Challenge Labs that still have some room. One is about mobile and artificial intelligence applications, so it’s called Connected Life. How mobile AI, internet of things will improve our lives.

Keith McAleer:
Another one that has some space in it is our disaster technology class. It’s called Disaster Technology: Creating Innovative Solutions to Environmental Change. So these two classes are Challenge Lab classes. This means that students in these classes will be able to build a team of interdisciplinary students and they will respond to this challenge. So the first class I mentioned, the challenge is to build something around connected life. So something with mobile AI, internet of things in these emerging areas and bring something together there to create a venture project and prototype. For the disaster technology class, we have been experiencing many disasters in California. Fire is one of them, but of course, there’s been pandemic, there’s been flooding in other parts of the US. There are many disasters around the world that technology can help with. So students in that class will be working on a prototype adventure to help solve some of these issues.

Keith McAleer:
And then our other class that has some availability is called Startup Acceleration, and this is our second time holding this class. And this one is for students who already maybe have a team, already maybe have a venture project. So this is kind of what we call a maybe pre accelerator. So maybe taking a class with SCET or you have a venture project you’ve been working on for a while and maybe have a customer or two. So for this class we will give you a mentorship advice and help you get to the next step for your project. So perhaps you can move on to commercial accelerator or SkyDeck, or one of the other areas in our ecosystem here to keep working on your project.

Laura Vogt:
And is there a certificate that students can work towards?

Keith McAleer:
Yes. Yeah, there definitely is a certificate. On our website you can see under Cal students there’s a page that shows all the requirements. Basically, there’s a coursework track. So in that one there’s six units that you will take to get the certificate, it’s called the Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Technology. There’s also a startup track. So it’s kind of similar to take some of our courses, but then also you will do an internship or be part of Berkeley SkyDeck or the Leadership Institute. And we also have a study abroad track, which we have actually the largest summer abroad program on campus. It’s called Global Entrepreneurship and Innovation. And the last few summers besides during pandemic, it’s been taking place in Portugal. So students go to Portugal for about a month and then earn six units at the same time and then also earn the Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Technology.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, that’s great. Anything that takes you to another country to learn? I just think is such an awesome opportunity.

Keith McAleer:
And I think just like I said earlier, one kind of belief entrepreneurs have in mindset is that when you are out of your comfort zone that is the best place to be for you to learn and grow. So yeah, picture yourself in the summertime going to Portugal, or we’ve been in France before, or Italy, somewhere completely different and teaming up with some students from not only Berkeley but all over Europe, all over the world and then working on a venture project with them. So it’ll push you out of your comfort zone. You’ll learn how to do innovation, entrepreneurship, have a startup project. And actually we’ve had some real venture companies come out of that program that are doing quite well now.

Laura Vogt:
And one of the things I know that I’ve heard about is a lecture series that you have. So is that something that students have to register for an entire semester or do you just drop in for topics of interest?

Keith McAleer:
That’s a great question. So we have a lecture series called the, A Richard Newton Lecture Series and it’s actually a Changemaker course, it’s been a Changemaker course for the last year or so. I guess the original story is that when the center was being founded we would bring in some kind of famous innovators, entrepreneurs to classes to talk about their company and how it was founded. And we kind of noticed that the cases were very interesting that they’re talking about, but we also thought that the people themselves were really interesting and their attitudes, their mindset, how did they deal with failure or how did they deal with their conflict in their team. So we thought that those stories that they would sell were also really valuable.

Keith McAleer:
So we started this A Richard Newton Lecture Series in honor of former dean of engineering, A Richard Newton, excuse me. And so we started the lecture series with the idea of let’s bring in the most distinguished entrepreneurs, innovators that we can and then have them just tell their stories for students. This is a usually one unit course open to undergrads, grads. It’s required for that Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Technology. And usually one of the first classes people take because it does have a bit more ability for enrollment because it’s a larger class.

Keith McAleer:
So, over the last several years, three or four years during the pandemic and hybrid, it was all online for a while. Then we kind had some in person some online. So to answer your question, can students just drop in or do they have to enroll. Essentially they can drop in. It’s huge class. Dropping in is definitely okay to see a speaker that you’re interested in. And also many of the videos we do produce and put online, so you can watch them later as well. But yeah, also I just recommend if you’re interested in enrolling it’s one unit so usually fits into your schedule, then you’ll be on your way to the certificate as well.

Laura Vogt:
Well, that’s great. You had talked a little bit about the X-Labs and I know that the Alt: Meat Lab is part of it. So can you tell us a little bit more about the labs and what type of research is going on there?

Keith McAleer:
Yeah, definitely. We started doing innovation labs about five years ago and our essential idea was that there are some industries that are emerging right now that are so huge and have such opportunity that we want to be able to focus a bit more on them at our center. So one opportunity that we identified that you mentioned was the alternative meats. This is still a really huge area for innovation and entrepreneurship. The food in the future, there are a lot of problems that alternative meats can potentially solve, which could be better health, could be less impact on the environment. Also, of course better for animals and animal welfare. So many entrepreneurs wants to work in this area to work on some of these problems.

Keith McAleer:
So the Alt: Meat Lab is directed by Dr. Ricardo San Martin and Dr. Celia Homyak, and they teach courses. So for example, this semester we have one called Technical Foundations in Plant-Based Foods. And it’s all about what are the patents right now with plant-based foods? What does the latest research show about developing new proteins, for example, from plants that can be more meaty, have the texture of meat, the taste of meat? Then the spring will have a class that will be a Challenge Lab class. So that one will be more about around students creating new venture projects and solutions. We’ve had some really awesome prototypes in the past that students have created, including really delicious ice cream, a plant based chicken wing that now the students who created that are about to get some significant funding. One project was about using this mushroom called koji and creating alternative meats out of that.

Keith McAleer:
So we’ll have the class in spring, but then also at the same time there’s research happening. So Dr. San Martin and Dr Homyak are hiring students and there are some actually opportunities on our website under about and jobs. You can see if you’re interested in being part of the research program, there are some student research positions open right now. And in the lab, they are working on how can you make a plant-based butter melts in the right way or make a cheese that’s more believable. Right now no one has really developed a very good plant-based cheese. So there are still problems to solve. And in the research area, the idea is that right now there is not a whole lot of public research around this innovative area of alternative foods. Much of the research has done in companies. And since it’s such an emergent industry, they don’t always kind publish their work. So the Alt: Meat Lab is working to do more research, make it public and start that research process so more can also learn and be involved in this growing industry and potentially lead to more solutions.

Keith McAleer:
One more lab I can highlight is the one I kind of mentioned before, which is the Disaster Lab. So yeah, as I mentioned right now, we have so much opportunity, I think with technology to help prevent disaster, to manage disaster better when it does come to us. Like I mentioned in California, we have fires, we haven’t quite figured out how to prevent giant wildfires that happen, how to keep people’s homes safe, how to respond in the most efficient way. And one thing is we think that technology can be better used to help prevent and manage these fires when they come.

Keith McAleer:
So for example, the Disaster Lab is partnering with the Marin Fire Department and the Marin Fire Department has given them some fire station space even, and the lab is training some young fire foundry recruits they’re calling them. So young people who are interested in firefighting and giving them the skills to be firefighters, but also young people are maybe a little more ready to adopt new technology. And there’s been sometimes challenging to have to break into an industry with some new technology and have it get adopted. So the Disaster Lab essentially the goal of them is to look at different technologies like for example, an application that’s in track fires or give firefighters a new vision into what’s happening in the fire on the ground, and then review the technologies and then, excuse me, help facilitate innovation around different technologies that can prevent or manage disaster better. Sorry. That was a little rambling. Hopefully I wasn’t to…

Laura Vogt:
No. That’s fine. I’m really kind of interested. Do you have a favorite program?

Keith McAleer:
Well, you did already mentioned the summer abroad program. So that one is definitely very high up there because like I said, there’s nothing like being able to go to a totally different place on earth, building a team with people that you never would’ve had the chance to team up with before. And then thinking about what’s a problem you all are really passionate about and then seeing if you can actually build some kind of solution to that. So that one definitely I think can be really transformative for students. And that one is definitely among my favorites.

Keith McAleer:
But another one I really like is actually happening this week and it’s our boot camp. So we have every semester, the week before the semester we have something called Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Boot Camp. And so it’s happening this week we’re at the week before the semester right now, and it’ll be happening in the spring, the week before that semester starts. And essentially for this program, it’s kind of similar to the summer abroad one in the sense that we have Berkeley students and then we also recruit students from all over the world to come it’s Berkeley. And then similarly we have… This time only five days. So in five days, students have to pitch their idea, do a one minute elevator pitch, team up and find a team with like-minded people who want to work on the same problem. Day two, you’re already making a pitch to some advisors and mentors. Meanwhile, you’re learning lectures along the way and getting feedback. And by Thursday, you are expected to have your full pitch ready, essentially. So students are already pitching their full pitch. And then Friday we have some kind of a few pitches that maybe were judges’ favorites, even though everyone is made a lot of progress usually at that point.

Keith McAleer:
So it’s just amazing to see students go from zero to one in five days. And for students, I think it’s nice that I think the more you can get experience with this entrepreneurial journey of taking something from an idea to pitching, the more experience you’ll have with… Because it’s usually, honestly, entrepreneurs they know that many projects don’t work out, many ideas don’t work out. Failure is obviously a part of entrepreneurship and we all have to fail a few times before we can succeed. Maybe you have a great idea right away and you’ll be so lucky that you’ll just succeed the first time, but most people do not. So if we can get students, some chances to try something, reflect on it, see what they learned. And the more opportunity we have to do that, then I think that the more quickly students can build some different skills, different attitudes and be more prepared the next time they have a great idea to be set up for a success. So yeah, that’s another program that I think is really great.

Laura Vogt:
In some ways you definitely have to learn how to fail.

Keith McAleer:
You do. Yeah. Like I said, maybe you’re so lucky or maybe you failed in a different way in life and so you already learned some of these strategies to work with. Like I said, maybe conflict in your team or with have an idea this maybe not profitable or doesn’t address the right market or being able to execute and actually build the thing that you have the idea for. And maybe next time you can think, okay, well that idea I had last time was so huge and so awesome, but no engineer in the world can build it. So maybe this time I will think of something that’s going to be very huge and make a big impact, but can have something more reasonable. Or maybe this time I learned instead of building the big idea right away, how about I build a small prototype and then get feedback from people and then see what they think and then have the chance to change my idea. So we think that you can learn a lot from cases and frameworks. And there are a lot of innovation frameworks out there that people use to be able to start these projects. But a lot of things, you also just have to learn by experience and learn on your own. And we think being in a intense environment at our boot camp is a great way to do that.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, that’s awesome. So I’m going to change scope on you and start a new topic. And let’s talk about your newer program of BEGIN. So what is BEGIN?

Keith McAleer:
Absolutely. Yeah. So BEGIN is the Berkeley Gateway to Innovation. So around five years ago… Or actually to even set the scene further innovation programs at Berkeley have just kind rapidly expanded over the last 10 or 15 years, and even the last five years. I got here to Berkeley about seven years ago. And so even since I’ve been here, there’s been just a exponential expansion of programs and resources available to students and faculty and alumni and others who want to be a part of innovation here. So when I came here myself and many others, I worked hard to learn, oh, what are these organizations on campus? What are they doing? What is their role in entrepreneurship and innovation? But it took me, I’ll have to say, a few years to really understand and I’m still learning. So it’s an ongoing learning process about which groups on campus are doing what and what their programs are about.

Keith McAleer:
So about five years ago we were really lucky that the State of California gave Berkeley some resources to be able to grow their entrepreneurship programs. The State of California recognized that Berkeley has been an engine for commerce in the state, producing a lot of alumni that have drawn on to create really valuable companies and really been at an economic engine for the state. So State of California helping Berkeley brought together a lot of these different organizations on campus, including SCET and SkyDeck, CITRIS Foundry, and many, many others.

Keith McAleer:
So we all got together and thought, how can we all better work together? How can we better communicate what we do to our students and to the alumni and to people on the outside as well? So there are many programs that were improved by the collaboration between people on campus, and we actually even created a council that still meets every month and is very active called the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council. But another kind of nice outcome of coming together was this website, BEGIN. The purpose of the website is not to describe every single program at Berkeley. But the purpose of the website is just to give some structure to what the different programs for innovation entrepreneurship do. Put them in maybe some simple categories and then provide some links so that students and others who are interested in connecting and figuring out the right resource for them can have a place to go.

Keith McAleer:
So for example, right now on the website if you scroll to the bottom, you can see our directory there. And we have categorized different resources at Berkeley into some simple kind of categories such as accelerators, alumni networks, commercialization, competitions, inclusion, funding, education, and lab space and prototyping. So this hopefully gives people a little bit of direction like, okay, I’m looking for a competition to join. I think that we have a pretty cool project and I want to get some feedback from judges and just try to see if we can improve through competition. So we have this area here and then students can see, oh, there’s the Big Ideas contest. There’s the Collider Cup from SCET. There’s the StEP Program from [inaudible 00:24:24]. Or if they want to take to class they can go to the new venture education area and see all the different centers and departments that are offering some kind of workshop or class.

Keith McAleer:
So that was how the program started for it began and the current goal of the website in order to help direct people. I will also mention that we don’t have every single resource here on campus. I would say that there are probably two or three times more resources than are listed here, and on purpose we do that a little bit. We try to only put resources on here we think are active, that students can really get connected to easily. Because we don’t want to just make an exhaustive list that is too many choices, the paradox of choice they call it sometimes. Where you’re not even sure where to start. We want to make it more easy for you to just try something because we strongly believe in innovation, entrepreneurship, it’s all about effort and trying to get to the next step in your project. So we do some curation as well here to hopefully give you the best resources and the folks you’ll have the best chance of connecting with.

Laura Vogt:
So what is the best way for students to begin utilizing the website?

Keith McAleer:
Definitely. So on the homepage there is something called innovation roadmap. So I was just mentioning earlier on that we try not to list every single resource on the websites and we want to reduce the number of choices people have to make so that you can just get started and not have to check every 40 websites before you can figure out which one is one that you like. So in the innovation roadmap, we have a fewer links than then directory. And here we have purposely listed just the biggest programs. So for example, if you want to get started you’re not really sure what to do, it does make sense to connect with Haas or Blum Center or Jacobs or SCET because we have lots of classes and lots of programs for you to try out. That’s an academic, so if you want a class.

Keith McAleer:
There’s also accelerate. So maybe you have a project, you have a team, you maybe have some traction but you’re just not really sure what to do. So in accelerate, you can see there’s SkyDeck and CITRIS Foundry, and StEP, Startup at Berkeley Law LAUNCH. And those are some really key resources I would say to try out first for accelerating your project.

Keith McAleer:
And then besides the roadmap, I would say that also besides resources on the website, we also have opportunities and events listed. So opportunities typically are things with applications. So it could be apply to join SkyDeck or apply for this competition. And then events could be anything that’s just associated with innovation, entrepreneurship, mostly Berkeley events, but sometimes we will list some external events too, that we think students might be interested in.

Laura Vogt:
So you were talking about that it’s not this exhaustive list. So how often are you able to update it and the resources and opportunities are available?

Keith McAleer:
In the spring we did a kind of massive redevelopment, redesign of the whole website and we did a lot of surveying of the Innovation Entrepreneurship Council. So we feel pretty good about the list that’s on there right now. And then I mentioned the IE Council meets every month, so we usually have some kind of BEGIN item there as well. So we also are kind of promoting this tool to the people who are running these different programs on campus as well to make sure they know that this is the place to go to list your program, make sure it’s categorized correctly and send us any resources or opportunities or events. So people might send us a new program they have, for example, or an event they’re doing.

Keith McAleer:
Recently we have been starting to partner with Berkeley Entrepreneurs Association as well around events, they’re very active student group. And we welcome any more partnerships or we welcome student groups sending us events they have to list on the website as well. We are considering to work on gathering our resource events and opportunities for the website.

Laura Vogt:
I’m going to ask this for both programs, but is there a good way to stay up to date with both programs separately?

Keith McAleer:
Absolutely. Yeah, we definitely for SCET have a regular newsletter that goes out every two weeks and I can send you the link for that you can perhaps put on your-

Laura Vogt:
Definitely. We have quick links that we put on each podcast.

Keith McAleer:
Great. Yeah. And then for BEGIN, we have been pausing our newsletter, but we will restart that newsletter soon as well. So I can also send you a subscription for that one as well.

Laura Vogt:
And I know we’ve got quite a few links here that we will put on the quick links for SCET and the website for BEGIN as well.

Keith McAleer:
Great.

Laura Vogt:
And is there anything that we haven’t talked about today that you wanted to add?

Keith McAleer:
I think that we did a very good job of covering these two programs. So yeah, I just encourage students to go to SCET website and BEGIN website and check them out for yourselves. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about any of the programs we have.

Keith McAleer:
I think one thing that many do to get started is to just take a course with us for SCET. And the one we mentioned before the lecture series is a great one to start with. And for BEGIN, definitely check out the website, start with the directory, look through it. I would also encourage you, if there’s a resource that you can’t find there or you’re not really sure which one is the right one for you, please use the contact form and let us know. Not only we can maybe connect you with the right resource, but also that helps us know what people are looking for, and then we can improve the experience on BEGIN as well.

Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for being here today. Your knowledge on both of these programs is amazing.

Keith McAleer:
Thanks so much for having me, Laura. It was really nice to chat with you and looking forward to school starting, I guess this will be coming out right when school starts.

Laura Vogt:
Yes. It’ll be our last newscast… Or no last newscast. Our last podcast before school starts on Wednesday.

Keith McAleer:
That’s awesome. Well, it what an exciting time of the year. It’s always so cool to see new students coming and older ones returning after nice summers of usually internship or learning something new as well.

Laura Vogt:
Yeah, we’ve a lot of our stuff is going to be in person for the first time in a couple years and I’m really excited about it.

Keith McAleer:
Me too. Wow. Well thank you very much and yeah, please. I encourage anyone to have any questions, please don’t be shy to reach out.

Laura Vogt:
And thank you to everyone for listening today to The Not So Secret Guide to Being Berkeley Engineer. And I look forward to podcasting with you next week. Bye.