Rochester a ‘KEY’ Location for Entrepreneurship

After four grueling years at an undergraduate institution, some students might take a year off to decompress and decide what they’re going to do next. Some might take a job—any job—to start paying off those loans. Then there are students like Andrew Slominski ’07, who’s fighting to bring new life to a church closed by the Rochester Catholic Diocese.

Slominski, who envisions turning the doomed church, Ss. Peter and Paul, a nearly 100-year-old Romanesque building in the southwest area of the city, into offices, classrooms, and space for musical performances, is campaigning hard for his vision during his Kauffman Entrepreneurial Year. Under the program, students are granted tuition-free time to study and practice entrepreneurship.

“I’ve heard [Rochester] Mayor Duffy and President Seligman both say that they are looking for ways to work together for the benefit of the city,” Slominski said in a profile published in City Newspaper. “This is the perfect joint project.”

The KEY program is one of several initiatives developed by the University with funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In 2003, the foundation selected the University as one of only eight institutions in the country—and the only one in the Northeast—to receive a major, multiyear grant to advance entrepreneurship in education.

Only three years after receiving that grant, Fortune Small Business Magazine last spring named Rochester one of the 10 best colleges in America for budding entrepreneurs.

“Entrepreneurial energy has now become deeply embedded in every school and program at the University,” says President Seligman.