Special Topics: Global Entrepreneurship

I took this course in the Fall of 2025. I needed an easy course to pair with AI.

I actually really liked the content and am overall glad that I took the course. As a stem major, I had never taken an entrepreneurship class or even a business class. I though that the information was great, the course really covers why startups fail and how to avoid it by knowing your customers and crafting your product to meet their needs.

Although I liked the content, it was very limited, as others have pointed out, the entire course is mostly on customer discovery. I would have loved for them to expand to other topics.

All that said, I have no idea how this course made it into the OMSCS or OMSA coursework, even as an elective. It really didn't have anything to do with computation or analytics. I thought they might have tailored to course to focus on tech startups, but no. It was also incredibly easy. I probably spent an average of 30 minutes per week on this course (I said 1 hour because that was the lowest amount).

Unfortunately for this course, what you put into something is what you'll get out of it. This course checked a box for me and gave me some good ideas, but that's about it. However, if I could go back, I still would have chosen to take this course. There is only so much time in a day and I needed something that I didn't have to worry about.

Structure: Your grade is mostly made up of presentations, exams, and quizzes. There is a participation grade as well, but I didn't bother with that and still got an A. The quizzes and exams are easy, you watch a lecture video and then take the quiz. I would watch the videos at 2x speed while taking the quiz/exam because most of the questions were about specifics from the videos.

The presentations come from the group project, group projects are weird in general, but I got a good group and didn't have to lead the team (unofficially). You mostly do some interviews and then you'll have to do one presentation (if you're in a group) then participate in the final. Pretty easy.

This class was extremely easy, and I think for the worse. The course pairs you with a group with the task of filling out a business model canvas and conducting market interviews. I felt that the entire class should have been compressed into about half the time, while the second covered prototyping, fundraising, and getting initial users. Unfortunately, this class didn't cover any of that which made me feel that my toolset as an entrepreneur is incomplete. This class would really benefit from expanding it's scope past market validation and into prototyping, but I understand the difficulties of actually building a startup with a group that may not be present, legal issues that may arise on ownership, and compressing the timeframe.

There were some good parts. This includes networking and the lecture videos. The videos, while lower quality/effort than some of the other classes, had great content and was presented by the professor in an easy to understand and intuitive way.

Are you a CS students who wants to build a startup? This class is for you.

Want to work for startup but not sure if they will survive or not? This class is for you.

Have a cool idea and really want to start coding to bring it to life? This class is for you.

The material that I have learned in this class was novel to me and I loved it. You will leave the class with some business perspective which is what I was lacking; some of the things that I have seen in my career now makes sense to me, thanks to this class. It is a great class to take and can be paired with another class as well. While the workload is lighter, you will still leave learning something great.

I have seen reviews about TAs being absent or course material being poor , well you can take this class w/o being worried of all of that. Your assignment feedback kinda comes in late but it is also not the harshest one. The intention of the class certainly doesn't appear to be failing or tricking you into getting lower grade (if grade is how you quantify things).

Video version: https://youtu.be/pXluusB4CZ0

This class has a lot of potential, but unfortunately its current form feels very half-baked. The lectures are very engaging and informative.

They're targeted at someone with a technical background who doesn't have much business experience. I think this type of class would be very beneficial for many students in OMSCS, but they really need to improve the rest of the course.

The course centers around a semester-long group project. Your team generates an initial idea and conducts customer discovery interviews (15 per week) for 8 weeks. You also fill out a business model canvas and submit a short video presentation each week. At the end of the semester you submit a longer video presentation to summarize your findings.

The requirements for the presentations do not change over these 8 weeks and so they end up feeling very repetitive. Also, the requirements are very vague and our team received wildly different feedback and grades depending on which TA graded our presentation, even though we used the same format for each presentation. Sometimes we would get marked down for not including something that was not mentioned in the requirements. A few times a TA posted in the forum that many teams were getting marked down for the same thing that wasn't mentioned in the requirements, but this was always after the fact and we were never made aware of these expectations before they were included in the grading rubric.

The TAs were also very unresponsive in the forums, often taken many days to answer even simple questions, and unfortunately this usually meant that answers were given only a day or two before deliverable due date. In general, these responses were also very vague and unhelpful. The professor posted a few times and seemed pleasant, but he's just not very involved with the administration of the course.

This course is still relatively new, so hopefully the instructional staff can sort out these issues. I would love to see more detailed and varied deliverable requirements, possibly focusing on different sections of the business model canvas aside from customer discovery. Case studies would also be great assignments since this is a business course.

This course is well-situated within OMSCS and thus has a lot of potential, but the execution and involvement of the instructional staff really must be improved to make it a worthwhile for students.

Really great class for aspiring entrepreneurs.

But if you are not interested in entrepreneurship, and doing it just to clear a module, I recommend not taking this. 55% of the grades are project dependent, and teammates are randomly assigned. During the module I was paired with 3 other teammates who couldn't be bothered by the group project aside from giving the bare minimum (we were, after all, just trying to clear an easy/fluff module). And as the result we got really bad grades for the project.

Well if you care about grades, maybe this is not the module for you

I recently completed the Global Entrepreneurship Course, and I must say, it has been nothing short of exceptional. This comprehensive course covers a wide range of topics related to entrepreneurship. The content is well-structured, engaging, and highly informative, making it an invaluable resource for aspiring entrepreneurs.

One of the standout features of the course is the teaching style of Professor McGreggor and his active participation which fosters a collaborative learning environment that allows students to learn from each other's experiences and insights. This approach not only makes the learning process more enjoyable but also helps to solidify the concepts being taught.

Another aspect I appreciated about the Global Entrepreneurship Course is its practicality. Weekly presentations in the Global Entrepreneurship course provide students with a practical way to apply their knowledge, develop essential skills, and gain confidence in dealing with real-world problems. This interactive format encourages students to apply the concepts they've learned in class to practical scenarios, enabling them to gain firsthand experience in dealing with challenges faced by entrepreneurs.

Overall, I highly recommend the Global Entrepreneurship Course for anyone looking to gain a solid foundation in entrepreneurship or enhance their existing skills. The course is truly transformative and has equipped me with the knowledge and confidence to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams.

Many high points and low points in this course. I absolutely loved the lecture videos and felt that Professor McGreggor was one of the first instructors to teach me how to properly give an engaging presentation - I will never spin up wordy, dull PowerPoints again. That said, the requirements for this course are often in contradiction to the lessons offered by the lecture videos. For one, a 3-minute summary of your Customer Discovery process is due at the end of each week, which requires you to follow a very strict presentation format and inevitably produce a dull analysis and read directly off of slides.

There are weekly quizzes that test your understanding of the video lecture material - most of them are trivial but it also takes a bit of learning to understand what the instructional team wants you to know as some questions are obscurely worded or have multiple potentially correct answers.

The greatest stressors from this course came from the weekly presentations. It felt like each week, the TAs chose to fixate on a particular issue associated with my presentations that I had repeated previously but, for whatever reason, has only now become an issue. For example, for the first 3 or so presentations I had overloaded my slides with text, but only got a deduction for this during Week 3. Once I addressed this issue, I was then getting points off for reading off of the slides. It seems very silly looking back that I wasn't able to pick up on these things, but I'm confident other students share my sentiment that you were often at the mercy of your TA in terms of how pointed their criticisms would be.

Despite frequently ambiguous requirements and a bit of anxiety surrounding presentation requirements and other deliverables, it's very easy to get an A in this course in its current format. As of Spring 2023, the maximum possible grade in this course is 110, not 100 - I believe a peer feedback or participation grade worth 10% was added at some point. This meant that I finished with a 103 in the course after averaging in the low-to-mid 90s on the presentations and quizzes, a 20/100 on my final participation grade worth 10%, and a 100/100 on the final presentation.

All in all, the course has some major headaches that could be remedied by the instructional team, but if you put in a modest level of effort you'll end up with a high A.

Based on personal experience Pros:

• New concepts for fairly technical background people like myself. (Learn about the Business Model Canvas, which is apparently a widely used template in the business world)
• Less technical
• Fun
• Easy quizzes, as long as you pay attention to the lecture of the week, you will easily score high.

Cons:

• Fairly mundane assignments... but also gives you predictability
• Mostly work surrounded Customer Discovery