Full Speed, Off Season

Summer is often celebrated as the few months during an academic year where students, faculty, and staff can take a moment to unwind, dive into personal interests, and plan ahead for what is sure to be another busy Fall semester. On a university’s campus, the summer tends to be a moment in time where offices are quiet, the hallway lights are dim, and Outlook inboxes are full of automatic replies from those on vacation. The quiet atmosphere provides a moment to breathe and prepare for another academic year, but after the first few weeks that environment can start to feel a bit like a ghost town. 

At Tufts Gordon Institute, the Derby Entrepreneurship Center, and the Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research, the summers are certainly an opportunity to unwind, travel, and plan ahead…but the too-quiet atmosphere is kept at bay through a host of unique programming during the months of June, July, and August. Instead of feeling like a ghost town, the air around the third floor of the Joyce Cummings Center has moments of excitement, students across generations participating in hands-on learning, and venture building happening right in front of our eyes. 

“Our summer programs provide unique opportunities for students to get the chance to dive into entrepreneurship, business, AI, and more in non-traditional classroom settings. This summer, I was able to see first-hand how valuable an opportunity that is for students of any age group,” said Peter Om, Program Coordinator at Tufts Gordon Institute. 

This year, the first weeks of June were already buzzing with entrepreneurial energy: six venture teams, ranging from retail to health and wellness to AI and more, dove into their work building a foundation of skills through workshops and hands-on activities, and motivation stemming from the support of mentors, Derby Entrepreneurship Center staff, and their peers. The Tufts Venture Accelerator (TVA) doesn’t ease founders into a calm summer of work; kickoff week alone stacked entrepreneurial workshops, alumni networking, and meetings with Entrepreneurs-in-Residence to set momentum for a busy and productive summer. The energy from that first week of June set the pace for ten-weeks of hard, diligent work in the Venture Lab that allowed the young founders to turn their passions into something real. 

As the ten weeks came to a close in early August, many participants reflected that the accelerator allowed them the time, momentum, and support to create tangible progress in their ventures while also giving them time afterwards to reset and refocus before going into the Fall. 

While the TVA kept the Venture Lab lively on the third floor of the Joyce Cummings Center, July brought another wave of excitement to the building just below, when Tufts Gordon Institute’s Immersive Experience (a weekend-long course that allows graduate students to dive into a specific topic) turned its attention to AI. For a weekend in mid-July, the otherwise quiet  second floor was filled with students, faculty, and guest speakers ready to network and learn alongside one another. Participants traded ideas through ice breakers, hands-on workshops, and near-constant networking, creating a buzz of energy that filled the second floor for an entire weekend.  

As the calendar flipped to late July and August, Tufts Gordon Institute and Derby Entrepreneurship Center picked up a different kind of energy entirely: Tufts Pre-college, run in three two-week iterations (Entrepreneurship, Business, and Marketing) each packed with fast-paced curriculums of workshops, guest speakers, and even field trips into Boston. The program leans heavily on graduate students and alumni to keep it running, and this year MS in Engineering Management student Eleonora helped lead the entrepreneurship and business sessions. What she found most impactful from the experience wasn’t just the curriculum, it was the students. 

“What stood out to me most was how curious and motivated the students were. It’s the middle of summer, and some of them made more than 40 calls to companies just to create opportunities to visit and learn from them. I loved getting to share what I know about business and strategy, but also teaching them practical skills like AI and Excel that they can continue using long after the program,” Eleonora told us after the program concluded. 

While all of this activity filled the classrooms of the Joyce Cummings Center, the Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research kept a different kind of momentum going, one measured in labs and partnerships. Over the summer, the Auster Center launched three new initiatives the Civic Innovation Initiative, Food and Society Innovation Initiative, and Environmental Innovation Initiative. The summer months allowed for lead faculty fellows to build their boards of experts, compile research agendas that will carry their initiatives forward, and begin plans for events that will take place in the fall. The Auster Center continued to support faculty and students throughout the summer in continuing their mission of advancing applied innovation and research at Tufts, through these initiatives and additional programming continuing to develop as momentum moves them forward. This is the kind of work that doesn’t always show up in the university hallways, but it’s just as central to what makes summer at Tufts Gordon Institute, the Derby Entrepreneurship Center, and the Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research exciting and energetic. 

Now, with the calendar turning to September, and the familiar energy of the start of the school-year filling the halls, the third floor of the Joyce Cummings Center can reflect on a summer that was anything but quiet. As Samin, a MS in Engineering Management graduate student who spent his summer supporting each one of the above programs,  put it: “This was a summer defined not by the absence of the usual academic rush, but by the presence of something richer – research, mentorship, and community building all happening at once, under one roof.” 

At Tufts Gordon Institute, the Derby Entreprneurhsip Center, and the Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research, those rich moments of connection are not the exception. That’s just what we call a successful summer.