Queen Mary’s entrepreneurial culture extends beyond its spinouts and business partnerships, with an improved and thriving student enterprise.
Queen Mary has a long record of supporting its students with their business endeavours. Through our Careers and Enterprise service, Queen Mary runs several programmes and sources of funding to aid entrepreneurs in getting their idea off the ground and turn it into a thriving business. Past successes include 'Too Good to Go', a social enterprise that enables restaurants with unused food at the end of the day to sell it to customers at a reduced price.
To get involved or find out more, you can contact Careers and Enterprise.
The QMentoring programme provides employer mentoring for students from low-income backgrounds, typically from local communities. In 2022 QMentoring was a finalist for a National Undergraduate Employability Award.
The benefits for those involved in the programme range from gaining insight into a profession and exploring potential career paths to building their professional network and learning new skills.
Our QHack programme provides the chance to learn how to get businesses off the ground, meet entrepreneurial students, and network with mentors and experts.
It provides a number of opportunities as those taking part can learn and consolidate skills, refine their ideas, and learn from the experiences of like-minded people.
Earlier in 2023, Queen Mary ran an entrepreneurial retreat for female students who have launched start-ups and businesses, aimed at teaching how to scale up a business and make it sustainable while avoiding burnout.
The retreat gave the students and graduates the opportunity to network amongst not only themselves, but also local entrepreneurs and wellbeing experts, and share their experiences and knowledge with each other.
The event was tailored to provide knowledge on specific areas students had wanted more information on – including how to collaborate, scale up their ventures, and be part of a wider network.
The experience was invaluable for the Queen Mary students involved, who spoke highly of the experience and recommended it to any like-minded entrepreneurs.
Find out more from our careers and enterprise team
Queen Mary's support enabled Inforens, a platform that connects prospective international students to students already studying overseas, to attend the annual Web Summit in Lisbon. Inforens was founded by Yash Gulati, a Queen Mary graduate.
Web Summit gathers a community of business leaders, developers, investors and start-ups together. It provides outstanding and valuable networking opportunities with investors and industrial experts. Web Summit gave Inforens the opportunity to connect with 15 industrial experts, including experts from KPMG, and Techstars.
Empowering graduate start-ups