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Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship

We are a dedicated institute for student entrepreneurs across campus and beyond. We aim to maximize your success by fostering your entrepreneurial mindset, promote inter-disciplinary collaboration and provide support for the creation and development of your new ventures. Jumpstart your ideas and get involved today!

Tune in for excitement!

Passion. Potential. Pitches. Don't miss any of the 2025 New Venture Challenge excitement.

Tune in Friday, April 11 at 1 p.m. for great ideas and fierce competition. Then, join the judges, mentors, spectators and teams as they see who is going home with thousands of dollars in venture financing. The awards broadcast begins at 6:30 p.m. and one team will walk away as the overall best venture. 

Start your entrepreneurial journey

Central Michigan University’s College of Business Administration is the home of the Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship and the first Department of Entrepreneurship in the state of Michigan. We are a student-centric hub where experiential, curricular, and external entrepreneurial opportunities intersect.

Our mission is to maximize student success by fostering a campus-wide entrepreneurial mindset that promotes inter-disciplinary collaboration and the creation of new ventures.

We aim to create innovative programming, boost cross-campus and ecosystem collaboration and provide a comprehensive mentoring program.

Our institute provides extracurricular opportunities and is open to all undergraduate and graduate CMU students.

Student opportunities

  • Meet experienced alumni, faculty, entrepreneurs, investors, and other business and political leaders.
  • Learn practical skills, innovative thinking, and connect with mentors and entrepreneurial resources.
  • Attend skill-building workshops and compete in pitch competitions and Hackathons.
  • Take part in special scholarship programs and travel experiences.
  • Pitch your venture at our signature New Venture Challenge event and compete for up to $20,000 in cash awards.

      Find your path

      Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur?

      Every journey is unique. Explore the opportunities that interest you.

      Going beyond the binary in personality assessment

      by Henry Heller

      Laura Willman, a doctoral student in the applied experimental psychology program, created a new measure connecting personality and gender. The two focus areas of Willman’s research are measuring gender identity in an inclusive way and looking at gender differences in personality traits.  

      Willman’s new measure looks into multiple aspects of gender identity such as importance, positive feelings towards one’s gender, how often individuals feel masculine or feminine, and the pressure individuals feel to be masculine and feminine. Compared to other measures, Willman’s measure is shorter and employs participants to answer questions about masculinity and femininity, regardless of gender category. She also tries to gauge how participants feel about their own gender identity and focus less on assessing gender stereotypes.  

      On other measures, Willman says, “Most measures of gender are really long or are made so that only men respond about masculinity and only women respond about femininity.” 

      In her findings, Willman discovered more inclusive measures allow more information to be revealed about participants and can accurately predict personality traits. For example, men and women feel various levels of masculinity and femininity. Also, a measure of masculinity more precisely predicts aggression compared to a binary measure of gender. 

      In the future, Willman “hopes to continue looking at different personality traits and keep finding ways to measure gender in a way that is accurate, inclusive and meaningful.” 

      This story is brought to you by the  Office of Research and Graduate Studies.

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