sam77sam7 wrote:
...I know I will be active within the Entrepreneur program...
In my experience, so will 80% of your class. They'll wear the club shirts, attend the conferences, and engage on small talk about "liking entrepreneurship". Some will also enter a business plan competition and others will do a field study or something like that to evaluate an idea they have. Several will pick more than one entrepreneurship elective.
A few (if any) will take a year off to focus on their summer start-up. Some will return and a maybe one or two won't (Steve Ballmer, anyone?). Right out of school, however, very few will start their own business.
Don't despair, though, because:
Some will join small companies upon graduation and take a lower pay in exchange for some equity or options.
Within 2 years of graduation a few will start business (the sponsored guys will wait 2 years +1 day).
Within 5-8 years, around 50% will work at firms with less than 150 employees (a reasonable proxy for "entrepreneurial setting"). Several will become multimillionaires within 5 - 15 years after successfully exiting their company.
Once you get to school you'll deconstruct entrepreneurship a little better. You'll figure that, unless you have a business plan in a specific area you know a lot about, you will feel more confortable learning about something on someone else's payroll before venturing on your own. You'll also learn that a couple of years of high-profile post MBA jobs will go to great lengths in getting you financing or, at least, credibility when you start your own business. You will also change your mentality, and will try and make it big. Living confortably with a small and stable business won't cut it, you'll want to be looking at double figure millions (at least on the spreadsheet) before getting involved on any venture.
All in all, I think B-school is a great place for entrepreneurship. Just because you don't see hordes of students going straight into it out of school it doesn't mean that students are not interested in it. Most graduates are entrepreneurs in the making who are just following the right steps in their long-term strategic plan.
L.