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Kinshuk, currently a senior in biomedical engineering at Ohio State University, started up in his junior year. His company, Oncofilter, is developing a special microfluidic tool to diagnose cancer. Developing this tool requires laboratory space, clinical trials, and other long-term and valuable resources: Kinshuk's relationships with university leaders, including the Deans of Engineering and Science, have been instrumental to his success in starting up so quickly and effectively.
People
Kinshuk considers himself lucky in his set of connections: he was fortunate enough to have the "right" friend in his Dean of Engineering. His professor and research advisor is also extensively influential at OSU and in the field of medicine, that same professor's wife is the Dean of OSU's business school. Kinshuk recommends connecting with high-level officials on campus: beyond their logistical abilities to make change, connecting with them also brought him greater self-confidence, credibility, and ambition. Knowing that people of high standing and authority trusted him created a feedback loop that empowered him toward his early success.
Materials
Process
Kinshuk's connections were made informally, but his outreach had strong intrinsic drive behind it. To students or entrepreneurs trying to make critical connections, Kinshuk recommends two things above all else: effort and focus. In discussing his goal of admission to Stanford University, he called high GPA, high GRE scores, and good research the "conventional" goal. His own method, and the one he recommends, is this: Find a passion, do everything humanly possible to meet it, publicize your accomplishments, and reach out personally to form working relationships.
Timeline
Work on Oncofilter began in the Fall of 2012, during Kinshuk's junior year and the beginning of his work as a University Innovation Fellow. Development was slow until the Winter of 2013, when results drastically improved and the Oncofilter team realized that the business had potential. The combination of a sound value proposition and good results led Oncofilter to win OSU's business plan and eTeam competitions in the Spring of 2013, and helped Kinshuk reach out to work with a professor at Stanford and a global leader in microfluidics research in the Summer of 2013.
Results
Follow-Up
Kinshuk continues to have active working relationships with the Deans of Engineering and Business, as well as with his research advisor.
Recommendations
The greatest benefit of making high-reaching personal connections, Kinshuk believes, is not the logistical clearance or power they can provide--instead, it is the personal transformation that occurs as a result of knowing people at the top. The greatest thing that Kinshuk says came of his early connections and his work with the UIF was the breaking of his own inhibition: regular contact with these changemakers helped him realize how similar he was to other ambitious people, and how possible his audacious projects actually were. He acknowledges that this inhibition never truly goes away: at the time of this interview, Kinshuk was mulling over how to ask a top professor at MIT for a favor in further developing his company.
Establish a relationship with university leadlers
• Intro (short paragraph on why you needed this connection)<br/> • People (who you wanted to connect with)<br/> • Materials (what supporting data or materials you brought with you to meetings)<br/> • Process (what steps you took and who you interacted with)<br/> • Timeline (how much time it took from idea to connection)<br/> • Results (what happened as a result of your connection)<br/> • Follow-up (what plans exist to maintain that connection)<br/> • Lessons learned and tips for others (what worked and what didn’t, and your recommendations for others)
