Mississippi State University received an upgrade on Tuesday when the Entrepreneurship Center officially opened in McCool Hall. The center aims to help students pursuing ambitions related to starting their own business or building an idea into a business.
Director of the E-Center, Eric Hill, said the center is meant to be a launching-off point on campus for entrepreneurs.
  “The center, the new Center for Entrepreneurial Outreach, which is affectionately [abbreviated] C.E.O. is trying to be a home base for that, a central point on campus for any major to find a team or connect on a project,” Hill said. “Those are the three things we do, connect, learn and develop.”
      To help with the first of these tenants connecting, Jeffery Rupp, the outreach director, reaches out to businesses and communities around the state in order to provide services to them that can only be provided by the resources of the university. 
   Three words appear on MSU’s seal:  learning, service and research. Rupp said that he caters specifically to the service aspect of the seal by taking teams of about 30 MBA students and having them help people around the state with various aspects of running a business. He recalled one story of helping a man whose town was wiped away by a tornado. The man was passionate about building tables, crafting them like art, but not about business. Rupp and his team of MBA students helped the man get a marketing plan up and going to sell his tables.
   “He has re-opened in Aberdeen,” Rupp said, eyeing his hand-crafted desk, “and he has a bunch of employees. He took this table up to the Tupelo furniture market, and now he has people outside of the state interested in his work. He said he wouldn’t be in business today had we not helped him.”
     Rupp said the E-Center and money given to the entrepreneurship program at MSU will help him start to reach some bigger goals.
   “One thing we did get was a 100,000 dollar grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission, A.R.C.,” Rupp said. “It was for technology. It’s not economical for me to drive around the state to find entrepreneurs and try to mentor that, from a time standpoint and a money standpoint. My next step is to try and step up a virtual entrepreneur mentoring network with the technology (in the E-Center).”
Having a virtual network, Rupp said, would allow him to reach out to people around the state without having to leave Starkville, or rather without him having to leave the technology in the E-Center.  
Rupp said he has one even loftier goal of working with the College of Architecture to gut and renovate a building in the Delta to encourage urban renewal. He admitted such a project would require everyone to be completely “plugged in” and to take weekly trips to keep the hypothetical project up to par.
        Learning is the second of the center’s tenets. Hill said he feels that the location and look of the center is the first step in drawing people in.
   “It’s on the campus tour map now,” Hill said. “The idea was to make it feel as much like Silicon Valley in Mississippi as possible.”
  The center, according to Hill, seeks to bring in as many young students from every major as it can. Hill said the curve of people visiting the center and utilizing the program is eschewed toward seniors, and that is something he wants to see change. 
     “What we’re trying to do is push that curve further to the left, so that we’re serving more incoming freshmen,” Hill said. 
   Hill added that he wants to keep pushing the curve to the left, so they are serving more and more freshmen, as well as reaching some high-schoolers interested in entrepreneurship. 
   As far as developing entrepreneurs goes, Nate Baker,  junior economics major, a program associate for the E-Center and president of the Entrepreneurship Network, said he feels the new resources will go a long way to helping young entrepreneurs.
       “So we just had the grand opening last Tuesday,” Baker said, “but we’ve been in this space for at least two or three months now. It’s been fantastic.  We have all this work space for various start-ups, various hardware and software that they might need, just a bunch of resources in addition to what we already had.”
       Baker said that currently about half of the people who use the center are business majors while the other half are engineering majors. He added that one of his goals for the center is to bring in less business orientated majors.
   “A very successful start-up of ours, which won entrepreneurship week last year, was a partnership between an engineering student, who interned for Tesla over the summer, and an art student,” Baker said. “They created a really cool business. You see a lot of that cross-pollination when different people from different perspectives, they have certain talents that they’ve developed more, and you can see something really unique take off.”
     Hill, speaking just before a four-hour conference call, said the center is available to anyone to use, and he hopes they utilize the resources at hand.
     “The program is to help students, faculty, staff start or grow a business,” Hill said. “So we literally see anything from fresh ideas that came off a napkin to when they came in, they sold 5,000 products and they need to figure out how to get to ten. That’s our primary mission.”
  The Entrepreneurship Center can be found on the first floor of McCool Hall. For more information, go to ecenter.msstate.edu or follow them on social media 
@MSStateECenter.