Student Opportunities

We have several opportunities for students interested in learning more about Yale Ventures and participating in one of our multidisciplinary teams. These opportunities are open to any college student, including rising college freshmen.

Our summer associates will be paired with one of our four teams—innovation training and startups, corporate strategy, innovation community, or IP & licensing services—supporting our core functional areas. In addition, associates will be able to take on a project over the course of the summer and present their work to the Yale Ventures team. The program will also feature monthly learning opportunities with Yale innovators to help deepen their understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale Ventures, in New Haven, and across the University.

All successful candidates should have a demonstrated interest in the innovation and entrepreneurship field, be able to work independently, possess excellent research and analytical skills, and be able to communicate and write effectively.

Commitment: Up to 20 hours per week, unless otherwise noted 

Compensation: These positions are compensated at $15.75 to $25 per hour

This summer associate will work on researching, designing and helping implement enhancements to Yale Ventures’ investor network.  Tasks include identifying and organizing our extended team's list of active VCs, and designing programs to expand the services Yale Ventures provides to VCs to connect them with deal flow of Yale startups. In addition, this role will help establish and implement an expanded Yale Angels program to connect angel investors with Yale startups.  This role will report directly to the Managing Director of Yale Ventures and work closely with the Executive Director of Venture Development and other stakeholders.

Preferred candidates: MBA students or students with management consulting experience.

Time commitment: This position may be up to full-time (35 hours per week).

The Yale Ventures Community Engagement Associate is responsible for sourcing and promoting entrepreneurship and innovation events, innovation stories, and community engagement on behalf of Yale Ventures. A successful Community Engagement Associate should have excellent communication and interpersonal skills, and experience with social media.  

• Review community events calendars across Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut innovation partners and promote on Yale Ventures channels: website, social, etc.    
• Develop engaging content that highlights the E&I community for the website and social media channels. 
• Work with the community to organize, plan, and promote events across the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem.  
• Analyze and report on community growth and engagement metrics 

Time commitment: This position is up to 20 hours per week.

The Innovation Community Special Project Associate will support special projects for the Innovation Community team, undertaking a range of responsibilities including research projects, benchmarking, and communications-related projects as-needed.  

• Yale startup research database: collect, organize, and analyze data on Yale founders, Yale startups, and Yale VCs. This work will require working with Yale units and collaborators, online sources, and community engagement.   
• Resources & Tools: Work with the Yale Ventures team to identify and organize existing Yale resources for the E&I community into an extensible “open source” online toolkit.   
• Reporting: work with the Innovation Community team on a communications dashboard for reporting metrics including but not limited to google analytics, website content, social media analytics, community and event engagement.

Time commitment: This position is up to 20 hours per week.

We are seeking a highly motivated, thoughtful, collaborative individual to join us as a summer associate. The Roberts Innovation Fund Associate will have an opportunity to work directly with the Yale Ventures team as we source, screen, select, and support faculty and their innovations on the path to commercialization or greatest impact. The Roberts Innovation Fund Associate will be well-versed on emerging trends and technologies, and have a keen interest in, or background in computer science. You will gain first-hand exposure to the process of sourcing, screening, and building a case to ultimately invest in a company. In this role, you will:

• Help to research market segments from a venture perspective across multiple domains.
• Provide reporting on investment opportunities, key stakeholders and industry trends.
• Conduct market research on the competitive landscape and identify trends in the specific area of invention.

Time commitment: This position is up to 20 hours per week.

Our Corporate Strategy & Engagement team has one full-time (35 hour) position available with our corporate strategy team to help with the following:

• Presentations & reporting: Develop impactful communications toolkit including presentation and reporting templates. Students will learn about academic-industry engagements by developing strong communication tools to streamline and provide consistency for Corporate Strategy & Engagement. 
• Salesforce & data: Salesforce implementation, data entry and validation. Students will learn about the CRM process, with special focus on corporate partnership building and management while building a consistent database for Corporate Strategy & Engagement. 
• Research & company intelligence:  find and collate information from company news on their websites, news outlets, and relationships with Yale affiliates with Development, and find areas of focus for overlap with Yale priorities. Students will learn how to “prospect” while helping Corporate Strategy & Engagement develop best practices for efficient company data gathering with available information and resources.

Time commitment: This position may be up to full-time (35 hours per week).

Focus areas: 1) engineering 2) molecular 3) lifesciences

Students will develop, refine, and redesign technology marketing assets that are used for business development efforts and external marketing campaigns. This includes assets such as Yale University pharmaceutical and device/diagnostic pipelines, patent database, and biological tools. Candidate will gain hands-on experience with marketing academic technology for commercialization. Gain exposure to business development, and marketing professionals while learning about the most promising technology being developed by Yale faculty. Candidate should be proficient in scientific language (molecular / therapeutics, ideal), Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Suite (InDesign and Photoshop). Basic understanding or interest in learning about website building. 

Preferred candidates: Scientific background or interests preferred.

Time commitment: These positions may be up to 20 hours per week, up to 5 hours per week for PhD students.

Blavatnik Associates are graduate and professional school students at Yale chosen through a competitive application process who will help provide both technical and business insights around faculty innovations being considered for support by the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation. The Blavatnik Fund supports Yale faculty in the commercialization of applied research and technology in the life sciences. Working in close conjunction with OCR staff, entrepreneurs-in-residence and Blavatnik Fellows, Associates will work in small teams to help identify the most promising projects in healthcare.

Learn more about the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation

Canaan-Yale Fellows are select graduate and professional school students at Yale who work in multidisciplinary teams to provide strategy and leadership around startups in Canaan Partner’s portfolio. Canaan Partners is a $4B global venture capital firm focused on seed and early-stage technology. Students are divided into two multidisciplinary teams to provide strategy and leadership around startups in Canaan’s portfolio. This opportunity is particularly geared to grad students in the biological sciences as well as medical school students with strong backgrounds in the life sciences. Students commit to: participating for one academic year for 40 hours per semester. Students receive: Education and direction for engagement from Canaan as they work with two projects in the fall and two in the spring, as well as a stipend. Students who complete the program will then have the opportunity to explore projects focused on select Yale research.

Learn more about Canaan.

The Roberts Innovation Fund at Yale is a new initiative launched in 2022 to accelerate Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS) engine of innovation. Thanks to a generous gift from Yale alumnus Will Roberts ’90, the Roberts Innovation Fund will provide funding, mentoring and business training to assist in the commercialization of breakthrough inventions that solve  real-world problems.  Just as importantly, faculty applicants will receive valuable feedback from the Fund’s director as well as from an external advisory board from industry, all of whom have invested in and/or built technology ventures.

Overseen by the Office of the Dean of SEAS in partnership with Yale Ventures, the Fund will focus on technologies that show promise towards having an impact within the domains of artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, blockchain technology, trustworthy computing, computational modeling, and more.  

The Roles

We are seeking highly-motivated, thoughtful, collaborative individuals to be among the first Roberts Innovation Fund Associates in 2022.  Roberts Innovation Fund Associates will have an opportunity to work directly with the Yale Ventures team as we source, screen, select, and support faculty and their innovations on the path to commercialization or greatest impact.

Role 1:  Roberts Innovation Fund Venture Associate

The Roberts Fund  Venture Associate will be well-versed on emerging trends and technologies in the venture capital industry, and have a keen interest in, or background in computer science related endeavors.  You will gain first-hand exposure to the process of sourcing, screening, and building a case to ultimately invest in a company.

In this role, you will:

• Help to review applications, draft project briefs, and create investor memos to be shared with Yale Ventures Leadership and the Roberts Innovation Fund Advisory Board.
• Conduct market research on the competitive landscape and identify trends in the specific area of invention.
• Create investor pipelines of funds most likely to be interested in each awardee.
• Develop financial projections that support a case for investment.
• Be available to meet with the Fund’s Director on a weekly basis.
   

Role 2:  Roberts Innovation Fund Marketing/Design Associate

The Roberts Innovation Fund Marketing/Design Associate will be well-versed on emerging trends and technologies in the venture capital industry, and have a keen interest in, or background in computer science related endeavors.  You will gain first-hand exposure to the process of sourcing, screening, and building a case to ultimately invest in a company.  As the Marketing/Design Associate you will also have the opportunity to create an immediate impact for viable applicants and awardees by crafting materials that support the growth of each project, leveraging your solid communication, marketing and design skills.

In this role, you will:

• Be involved in the application review process
• Create well-designed materials that help showcase the potential of each viable proposal and awardee submission, including powerpoint pitch decks, company briefs and investment memos.
• Create materials in support of awarded projects such as preliminary website pages, marketing materials and more.
• Be available to meet with the Fund’s Director on a weekly basis.
   

Role 3:  Roberts Fund Business Development Associate.

The Roberts Fund Business Development Associate will be well-versed on emerging trends and technologies in the venture capital industry, and have a keen interest in, or background in computer science related endeavors.  You will gain first-hand exposure to the process of sourcing, screening, and building a case to ultimately invest in a company.  As the Business Development Associate for the Roberts Innovation Fund, you have a unique opportunity to help faculty innovations expand into viable commercial opportunities.

In this role, you will:

• Help to source and recruit applications to the program.
• Gain deep insight into the application review and selection process.
• Conduct market research, and begin customer discovery
• Research the larger landscape with an eye towards potential partnerships and other synergistic activities
• Be available to meet with the Fund’s Director on a weekly basis.
   

Learn more about the Roberts Innovation Fund.

Yale Venture Lab is a new initiative launched by Yale Ventures in 2022 to accelerate Yale faculty ventures which have already established proof-of-concept. Working across six major themes (Therapeutics, Medtech, Digital Healthcare, Data Science, High Tech, and Climate Tech), individual innovators will meet with small teams of experts (Yale EIRs) drawn from industry and the investment world to refine their development tasks, better understand the business landscape, and think critically about products and indications.

Every session is a carefully orchestrated workshop moderated by Yale Ventures directors to support important laboratory research. Every session is also staffed by a Yale MBA, PhD or MD student with an appropriate background to document the session, capture the experts’ recommendations for major objectives, and support the faculty innovator in post-session market research. Candidates seeking to become Venture Lab Fellows must be extremely organized, possess excellent communication skills, and capable of interacting with a wide range of domain experts.

Role: Venture Lab Fellow

The Venture Lab Fellow will be well-versed on emerging trends and technologies in the venture capital industry, and have a keen interest in, or background in computer science related endeavors. You will gain first-hand exposure to the process of sourcing, screening, and building a case to ultimately invest in a company. As the Business Development Associate for the Roberts Innovation Fund, you have a unique opportunity to help faculty innovations expand into viable commercial opportunities.

In this role, you will:

• Be available to participate in one 90-min long Venture Lab (typically held during business hours) at least every other week throughout the academic year.
• Support the Yale Venture directors in creating meeting materials and agendas
• Capture all major discussion points between faculty innovators and invited EIRs
• Join in the closing discussion between all participants to capture the going forward major objective
• Support the faculty member by performing relevant market research and other desk research as may be appropriate following the session

Learn more about Venture Lab.

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Now in its 9th year, the Yale Innovation Summit will convene innovators across Yale and beyond for two days of impactful conversations, purposeful networking, and inspiring lessons of leadership.

This year’s theme, Expanding Impact, reflects the momentum of the Yale and Connecticut entrepreneurial ecosystem and the Summit’s growth to now include tracks across more areas of groundbreaking innovation including arts, biotech, climate, health, and technology.

We are seeking students interested in 2-3 hour shifts between 8am - 8pm both days. As a volunteer, you will be able to attend any part of the Summit before or after your shift. We need volunteers at the registration tables, innovator pitch rooms, and during breaks, performances and receptions.  

Contact

Please send your statement of interest and resume directly to michelle.mcqueen@yale.edu

A work-study engagement opportunity for students who have an interest in innovation, entrepreneurship and marketing. It will be open to undergraduate, graduate and professional students who are looking to gain real-world skills in marketing and outreach while supporting the Yale Rothberg initiative. Students will receive guidance from Yale professionals with expertise in marketing and innovation/entrepreneurship. Fall and spring semester opportunities will be available.

For more information, please contact Michelle Nantel at michelle.nantel@yale.edu.