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Check this video link to learn more about the Think Try Do Programme and the GEM Fund
Learn more about the kind of support offered by the Student Start-Up Team to all University of Exeter entrepreneurial students through the Think Try Do Programme, and how the GEM Fund can help us nurture and retain all the talent we foster in the region, by offering their businesses a chance to succeed.
Check this video link to meet some of our graduate entrepreneurs
Listen to some of our graduates share their thoughts about the biggest challenges they had to face, right after graduating, when trying to make their Start-Ups succeed. Our GEM Fund and the new Centre for Entrepreneurship are designed with this in mind: help foster future generations of University of Exeter graduate entrepreneurs and help them overcome, if not avoid altogether, these initial hurdles.
We've met with Hugo Tilmouth and Hakeem Buge, two University of Exeter - Cornwall Campus - graduates and founders of ChargedUp, and this is what they had to say about our GEM Fund initiative:
"The University of Exeter provides a great environment to develop and test business ideas alongside your studies. You are afforded the luxury of time without many dependencies. Once you
graduate and enter 'the real world' this is lost to getting a job to make rent and bills etc. So the benefit of time that the Graduate Entrepreneurship Maintenance Fund will give to students wanting to throw themselves into their startups is invaluable. Allowing students to make the most of the opportunities given at university and supporting them as they kick on with their business
moving from student to entrepreneur is fantastic." 
Last week we were in London to attend the Santander Universities Entrepreneurship Award semi final. Whilst we were in town, we took the opportunity to catch-up with some of our graduate entrepreneurs now living and working in the Capital to ask for their feedback on our GEM Crowdfunding initiative. Ben Hayes , Director at Grasp had this to say:
"A lot of great student businesses are lost after a founder(s) graduates - when the pressure and expectation of them ‘getting a real job’ are put on them - so it’s great to see the GEM fund setting up to address this. When I left Exeter there wasn’t as strong an infrastructure in place as there is now, so I’m incredibly jealous of those who will be able to benefit from the fund and the support it gives. It will allow students and graduates to have a little more room to grow, which in turn should help bring bigger and better ideas to life."
