What Comes After Graduation? For Some Entrepreneurs, a Fellowship

Guidance for growth after graduation

For Ritika Shamdasani, the Miller Fellowship arrived at just the right moment. She is an alumna of the 2023 cohort and co-founder of Sani, a culturally inspired apparel brand. She ran the company while still in college and sought continued support after graduation.

The transition from being a college student to a full-time entrepreneur was hard for Shamdasani as she became her own boss. The Miller Fellowship gave her a structure that helped her better manage time. It also gave her a better understanding of what she wanted to do with the apparel company and who she wanted to serve.

“Initially, Sani was just things you’d wear to an Indian wedding,” Shamdasani explained. The founders realized that a majority of South Asian Americans waited to go abroad to shop for their cultural clothing. They realized they needed products people would come back to in order to create repeat customers, so they expanded on everyday dressing.

“We just became really clear on what our product assortment looks like, and that’s something that I don’t think we had certainty on before,” Shamdasani said about her time in the Miller Fellowship.

For Shamdasani, the most important thing about the Miller Fellowship was the people she was surrounded by. With a majority of her friends going into corporate America, she valued having a support system.

“Having people to talk through things and having someone you can relate to is something that really helps, because you feel less lonely,” Shamdasani said. “I would say the people were the best part of it.”

Shamdasani recommended that people apply to the Fellowship even if they are not sure what direction to take for their company. “Let’s say you don’t have a clear idea of what your company will become or you don’t know if it can transition to full-time,” Shamdasani said. “That’s what the Fellowship is there to help you figure out.”

Navigating business transformations

Kyle Paterson joined the Miller Fellowship with an idea for a job shadowing platform in the 2022 cohort. Today, he runs a personal branding agency in New York City that works with executives, founders and a university president. He says the Fellowship helped him find direction and build a community around his work, even as his business changed drastically.

His original startup idea was to create a network for short-term job shadowing. But toward the end of the Miller Fellowship program, he realized something else was working better: his sales process. “I had to pay rent, so I was like, let me sell this as a service to other businesses,” Paterson said.

Just a few months after the Fellowship ended, he hired his first employees. The company started as an outsourced sales team and evolved into a consultancy helping clients build their automated systems. Eventually, Paterson saw a bigger opportunity. The clients who saw the most success already had a strong online presence, so he pivoted again. His company now helps people build an online presence and become thought leaders in their industries.

“That time was very formative,” Paterson said. “Entrepreneurship can be so isolating sometimes. It was really good to have some guidance, but also community for some of the decisions that I thought about making and it ultimately pivoted the whole company, which has led me to where I am now.”

The biggest lesson he learned? Always be testing. “Don’t accept one thing as the truth,” he said. “Keep your mind open.”

Now based in Manhattan, Paterson works with a six-person team and advises future entrepreneurs to double down on who they are. “It’s so much easier to build relationships and close deals when you’re not trying to be what you think people want,” he said. “To stand out is to actually make an impression. And to make an impression is to actually create a result.”

He also encourages people to apply to the Fellowship, even if they don’t have it all figured out yet. “I’ve never worked for anyone else,” he said. “It can suck sometimes, but now I can go on a ski trip on a Tuesday. It’s worth going through the years of not knowing where things are headed because eventually, you get the freedom.”

Business support for any industry

Kyle Tomek was a Ph.D. student in chemical and biomolecular engineering when he joined the 2022 cohort of the Miller Fellowship. His company, DNAli Data Technologies, started as a research project in NC State’s College of Engineering. At the time, he was still figuring out who his customers would be and what the company’s product should look like.

Today, DNAli supplies high-quality DNA to labs that work in biotechnology and synthetic biology. The company secured Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding from the National Institutes of Health and collaborates with NC State researchers to develop new DNA tools.

Tomek credits the Miller Fellowship with helping him shift his mindset. “I was a scientist coming out of the lab,” he said. “The Miller Fellowship really helped me turn into more of a business person and entrepreneur than just a scientist working on a company.”

The Fellowship stood out to him because of its structure. Monthly check-ins gave fellows a chance to talk through what was and was not working as well as what their next steps would be across different industries. “I was in biotech,” Tomek said. “But there was someone starting a design firm, someone creating an app, someone selling homemade soaps. We were all learning the same things about starting a company.”

Those sessions often led to real collaboration. “One of the other fellows helped me land a meeting with a VC,” Tomek said. “Even just getting that conversation was a win.” He also remembered learning practical lessons from peers, like how to schedule customer calls and pitch a product more effectively.

At the time of the fellowship, DNAli was exploring a very different application: DNA data storage. But they realized the market wasn’t ready. The company pivoted, focusing instead on research labs, diagnostics and therapeutic development.

One of the biggest surprises for Tomek during the Fellowship was realizing how transferable business fundamentals were. “I thought, oh, biotech is so unique,” he said. “But really, business is business across different fields.”

His advice to students thinking about entrepreneurship is to make the most of the resources NC State offers and apply to the Miller Fellowship. “A great thing about being an NC State student is the resources that are available,” Tomek said. “I didn’t realize that until I had already graduated, and that’s where I think the Miller Fellowship is special, because it gives recent graduates access to those resources for longer.”

A leg up for graduating entrepreneurs

The Miller Fellowship began in 2014, when four engineering students wanted to pursue their startup after graduation but needed time, resources and something to show after graduation. Professor Tom Miller found a way to help, offering a small stipend, “enough for rent and ramen noodles,” and continued access to campus.

What started as a one-time fix became a program. Former students eventually raised funds to endow it, naming it after Miller.

From the beginning, the goal was not just to launch companies, but to support students figuring out if entrepreneurship was right for them. “We don’t measure success by whether the company survives,” Miller said. “It’s about how they move forward on their entrepreneurial journey and what they learn about themselves.”

Looking ahead, he hopes to see more connections between the program’s growing alumni base. “We’ve had 11 cohorts now,” Miller said. “I’d love for them to feel like they’re part of one larger community.”

The Miller Fellowship program increases the success rate of promising entrepreneurs by providing a stipend and new venture support to graduates who would otherwise not have the financial means to do so. The program takes place from June to November every year, culminating in a showcase hosted by NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship.