Welcoming various members of the business and entrepreneurship world to campus every week is Founding Fellowship, a class within the Taylor University Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) program.
The once-a-week, one-credit class brings outside entrepreneurs into the classroom, allowing students to hear the stories of business owners from all walks of life and ask questions.
The class is coordinated by Taylor’s Entrepreneurs in Residence, Nick and Molly Pastermack, who joined the Taylor University staff this year.
The Pastermacks only spend one week on their story so that students can learn from as many guests as possible. They also get to know the Pastermacks through one of the class's assignments—going out for dinner with them at the Hodson Dining Commons.
Having started several Kingdom-impact-focused businesses across the country, the Pastermacks teach from their experiences while remaining in relationship with those now operating their businesses.
“The way we've grown is we've found people who are like-minded, love Jesus, who want to have an impact in a community, business world, and that we can trust them, and so we've allowed them to buy in some ownership,” Nick said.
The Pastermacks have moved 14 times. In every place the Lord has provided community and allowed them to meet people — some of whom were invited by the Pastermacks to speak for the class at Taylor.
“My job as a professor is to curate (speakers) through different disciplines and different fields and walks of life all over,” Molly said.
Bringing speakers in from different niches and with different talks can be valuable to different students. The class is open to students of all majors and minors.
Post-college, everyone is in business, Molly said.
“Our goal is to help monetize their major. So, whether it's exercise science, media, psychology or computer science, we’ve had the whole gamut,” Molly said.
Molly said the class is a networking opportunity and good for developing relationships with people across different industries. The speakers are eager to give back and invest in students by giving out their contact information. Some students have even been able to land internships.
Every week after the class, students both in and out of the class are invited to eat lunch with the speaker for Eat-and-Glean.
Students also learn how to follow up with the speakers who visit, write thank-you’s, host and entertain guests, and take them out for meals.
The failures are the most important thing for students to hear, Molly said. Speakers are asked to come and be very authentic, sharing what their first steps were.
Learning from those in the industry can be intimidating, but students can learn how to fail and get back up again through hearing the stories, Molly said.
Listening to the speakers can be intimidating, and breaking into the entrepreneurship world may seem impossible, but learning the story of a successful business owner is helpful.
“They’re usually 20-year overnight successes,” Nick said. “It's like, all of a sudden, ‘Wow, look what they've done,’ but it was 20 years of making hard choices, failing, getting back up, doing it again, making a hard choice, failing.
Christ-centered education is also central to the class.
Senior Allison Holder (a business major and entrepreneurship minor) took the class last year and said it was very valuable and applicable outside of college.
“It gave us examples of what we might run into after college and how to better prepare ourselves as Christian business people,” Holder said.
All the speakers chosen are Christians, allowing students to learn the powerful stories of how the Lord was with them throughout their careers.
Through sharing their own experiences, speakers can guide students to use the gifts that God has blessed them with, hear the voice of the Lord, and make hard decisions.
“Anytime anybody wants to know our speaker schedule or join us for lunch, they're more than welcome,” Molly said. “Just reach out to me via email, or to anybody in the class. We like to make it as accessible as possible.”
Nick and Molly Pastermack can be reached at nick_pastermack@taylor.edu and molly_pastermack@taylor.edu, respectively.
