Rebecca Dohrman

High-Tech Entrepreneurship for the Millennial Workforce: Empirical Analyses of Career Perceptions and Meaningfulness of Entrepreneurial Work

Abstract: In December 2006, Purdue University was chosen as one of the six Kauffman Campuses II Schools, that is, universities that receive Kauffman Foundation funding toward the goal of creating a culture of entrepreneurship on campus that extends to students in all majors, rather that just select majors (Kauffman Foundation, 2008). Entrepreneurship is an interdisciplinary field that has exciting and endless possibilities for fostering interdisciplinary graduate education, particularly here at Purdue University. Because of Purdue Research Park and the high number of high-tech or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduate students studying at Purdue University, enhancing interdisciplinary graduate education through encouraging the study of high-tech entrepreneurship as a career choice is a natural and effective fit. In fact, 54% of the graduate students at Purdue are students in STEM fields (Purdue Data Digest, 2008), so this project has potential to impact a substantial number of Purdue graduate students. To support current entrepreneurship initiatives at Purdue and to provide information that will help guide future entrepreneurship initiatives on campus, this projects objective is to conduct secondary data analysis, interviews, focus groups, observations, and a rhetorical analysis in order to produce a well-rounded, rich, report detailing the perceptions of the majority of graduate students, Millennials, toward high-tech entrepreneurship. In addition, this report will detail the medias construction of entrepreneurship as an attractive career for the Millennial generation, which will provide the Graduate School with an analysis of the many options they have for framing entrepreneurship as attractive to Purdue Graduate students.