Connecting multicultural alumni with Colgate, current students, and each other through fellowship and mentorship.

Colgate’s Thought Into Action (TIA) incubator is seeking diverse mentors who can help its student entrepreneurs. In the past nine years, TIA students have benefited from more than 20,000 hours of mentorship from 134 alumni and parents.

Mentors help the student founders to develop skills, refine their ideas, learn the art of the pitch, solve problems, deal with failure, build teams, and attract investors and resources for growth. For TIA, entrepreneurship is about more than business; many TIA ventures are in the areas of nonprofit and social justice.

While the TIA experience is as much about the journey as the end result, several ventures have turned into solid career pursuits, such as 2013 classmates Yuni Sameshima and Joey Petracca’s digital grocery experience Chicory and the nonprofit Lakota Children’s Enrichment founded by Maggie Dunne ’13. One entrepreneur, Ryan Diew ’17, even had a chance to pitch his airport navigation app Trippie on the hit TV show Shark Tank this past October.

Mentors should have direct experience building companies, organizations, and nonprofits, as either founders or team members, or work in a field that supports startups, such as legal, marketing, or branding.

“All we ask is that a mentor is willing to devote one Saturday a month to coming to Hamilton,” said Mary Galvez, TIA’s director, “and we’ll take care of lodging and transportation if needed.”

If you are interested in joining our mentors to work with students and give back to Colgate in a meaningful way, fill out our mentor application form. Have questions? Contact Mary Galvez (mgalvez@colgate.edu) or Wills Hapworth ’07, alumni executive director (wills@tiainstitute.com).