Building tomorrow’s innovators: Penn’s Widjaja Entrepreneurship Fellows Program

In the first semester for the Sugi and Millie Widjaja Engineering Entrepreneurship Fellows Program, a select cohort of 12 students at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science learned what it takes to transform ideas into potential companies. Their startups may be fictional, at least for now, but the lessons are entirely real.

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Tom Cassel, practice professor in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics and the instructor of the course, addresses the class. “You’re probably going to need to get seed funding before the Series A,” he says. Cassel knows what he’s talking about: In the late 1970s, he founded a consulting firm that grew into a significant independent power company that, by the 1990s, owned power-generating facilities with a combined capital value exceeding half a billion dollars.

After selling his own venture, Cassel considered retiring. Instead, he created Engineering Entrepreneurship (EENT), a suite of programs designed to teach Penn engineers how to bring their ideas to market.

For years, Cassel and Ted Schlein, a Penn Trustee and Silicon Valley veteran, envisioned an even more immersive experience within EENT—a program that would pair personalized mentorship with hands-on internships at startups. But launching such an ambitious initiative required more than just a vision; it demanded additional resources and dedicated staff, in particular someone capable of leveraging Penn Engineering’s alumni network while mentoring students directly.

Enter Sevile Manickarottu, the former director of the George H. Stephenson Foundation Bioengineering Educational Lab and Bio-MakerSpace. Now Penn Engineering’s director of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, Manickarottu had years of experience guiding students through the rigors of Senior Design.

With strategic input from Schlein and the generous support of alums Sugi Widjaja and Millie Wan—for whom the Fellows program is named—Cassel’s vision became reality. “It’s important to shape an entrepreneurial mindset,” says Wan, “because you can have great ideas, but you need to have a reliable channel to bring those ideas to fruition.”

Ultimately, the Sugi and Millie Widjaja Entrepreneurship Fellows Program equips participants with the tools they need to chart impactful careers on their own terms, leveraging everything they’ve learned as engineers in the context of business.

Read more at Penn Engineering Today.