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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.

      Graduate student accelerates admission letter process

      by Kara Owens

      Naveen Kumar Reddy Patil poses for a photo outside after utilizing software to speed up the writing of admission letters.Naveen Kumar Reddy Patil, a graduate student in Business Information Systems, created an automation system to generate admission letters. While working as a graduate assistant in International Recruitment, Patil was tasked with creating admission letters for hundreds of students. This process would take three to five minutes for every candidate. The method consisted of referring to an MS Excel file, filling in information on an MS Word document, and then saving the document as an MS Word and pdf. With this process being so time consuming, Patil was inspired to help with the manual operation.

      “When I was studying [for my undergrad] in India, I had learned a Mail Merge concept in MS-Word that [loads] excel values into a Word document,” says Patil. However, the method Patil had previously used in India does not allow for saving multiple admission letters at a time with specific student name and I.D. This prompted Patil to use Individual Merge Letters add-in along with Mail Merge which splits the individual admission letters and saves them as Word documents and pdfs including the file name.

      With Patil’s help, International Recruitment has saved many “person-hours to create admission letters”. Now, if 100 admissions letters need to be created it will take a few seconds opposed to the earlier manual process which would have taken eight hours.

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

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