Yellow brick road(s)

But with the vast array of opportunities available to us, Princeton students need not follow these paths like some batch of blind, greedy lemmings. There is another option for those who aspire to make a lot of money or make a name for themselves: entrepreneurship. To be sure, entrepreneurship may be a riskier career path than finance or consulting. But in spite of the risks, the potential for impact and success at such a young age is incomparable.

Let me be clear — I am not advising that every Princeton graduate become an entrepreneur or join a start-up. Personally, I’d rather see Princeton become an incubator of teachers or doctors. But for those Princeton students who pursue careers in finance or consulting because they don’t think they have other viable options, I think that there is something to be said for encouraging entrepreneurship as an alternative.

So why hasn’t entrepreneurship taken off at Princeton? Despite an incredible network of entrepreneurial alumni — some of whom are the namesakes for our residential colleges — and despite the fact that we have all the raw material for a great entrepreneurial community — engineering talent and global-scale ambitions, just to name a few — this campus is institutionally unfriendly (though not antagonistic) to entrepreneurial endeavors.

Consider Stanford, a clear foil for everything that we’re not doing to support entrepreneurship on campus. The New York Times last week featured a story about Stanford’s “Facebook App Class” in which students produced applications on Facebook’s developer platform. Several of the teams in that class have evolved into real, successful companies. And this type of class is hardly a rarity at Stanford, where an iPhone application development class has already become absorbed into the curriculum. Meanwhile, at Princeton, students have campaigned and failed to bring a mobile programming course to campus. The computer science department, so I’ve heard, was more interested in teaching theory than practice.

At Stanford, students came together to create their very own technology incubator, SSE Labs, as a home for campus start-ups. At Princeton, where every a cappella group has its own room, our start-ups are homeless (and I haven’t forgotten about the Keller Center). The list of contrasts goes on, but I hardly have the word economy to detail them all. It is enough to say that Princeton and Stanford are very different places.

Certainly, part of what gives Stanford such an entrepreneurial spirit is that it sits at the heart of Silicon Valley, which is as close to an entrepreneur’s mecca as there could be. It’s impossible to be a Stanford student and not have any consciousness of the culture around you — the energy and congestion of starry-eyed start-ups, big-name powerhouses and elite venture firms. You think there’s a large number of financial firms at Princeton career fairs? Imagine how many infant start-ups must pack into their auditoriums looking for that crucial employee number one.

While New York’s booming technology scene, whose standard bearers include Foursquare and Etsy among many others, is not (yet) of the same caliber of Silicon Valley’s, there is good reason to think that in the coming years Princeton will become a larger feeder of engineering talent to “Silicon Alley” and that this influence will propagate entrepreneurial projects across campus. Start-ups have a way of giving life to other start-ups, and once Princeton engineers embed themselves into the New York City tech scene, we’ll see that pattern ring true here too. Perhaps we’ll see the same type of symbiosis that exists at Stanford between its students and the companies nearby begin to take shape.

A venture capitalist to whom I spoke recently about the Princeton-Stanford polarity put it neatly when he said that Stanford is bordered by Sand Hill Road, and Princeton is bordered by Wall Street. (Sand Hill Road, which is the home of some of the finest venture capital firms in the country, is just as symbolic of Silicon Valley as Wall Street is of the financial world.) But the ever-expanding New York City tech scene has equal right to that border. And as more and more New York start-ups come to Princeton to hire their first employees, we’ll be sure to see a growing contingency of Princeton entrepreneurs.

But culture moves slowly without proper institutional support, and while I am confident that Princeton will start to look more and more like Stanford in the coming years, this process of change is going to move at a slower pace than it deserves if the administration doesn’t take a friendlier stance toward entrepreneurship on campus.

Peter Zakin is a philosophy major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.