It is nothing short of amazing to see the entrepreneurial revolution happening at our local universities. From the EClub and IDEA programs at Northeastern to ILab and HackHarvard at Harvard to StartLabs and Startup Club at MIT to the BCVC at BC and the VDC at UMass Boston, there are tons of programs at different schools. This is creating hundreds of startup hungry students.

Right now our biggest challenge is making them aware of our ecosystem, but soon I believe we may solve that issue, but be left with a new challenge: What to do with all of them?

College is a unique environment that plays a key part in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Education occurs in major ways both inside and out of the classroom. I learned a great deal in my time at Northeastern University, but even with the great pair of degrees I recieved (Electrical Engineering & Technical Entrepreneurship), I found there were a number of important skills an entrepreneur must develop that I did not learn. If you have the opportunity to learn any of these skills while in school, take full advantage! Your future startup will thank you.

Thanks to all the press embracing technology, the movie the Social Network and the emergence of the consumer web and mobile apps, entrepreneurship is in the spotlight again. With that comes the interest and excitement of students in college. You can see it on all the campuses around Boston as seemingly every school has an entrepreneurship club, a startup mentoring program and hackfests. These programs do everything from inspiring new entrepreneurs to coaching them through their first venture.

The problem is, the odds of you being the next Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Clerico, or Aaron Levie is statistically insignificant.  What's more likely is that you can lay a foundation in college for an amazing career as an entrepreneur that later in life becomes a successful founder. Here's a few tips for making the most of college to prepare for being a great entrepreneur.

When you start a company, you are usually in one of two camps: a veteran who has worked at multiple startups and knows the monster challenge you're up against OR a first timer who has limited startup experience but an abundance of passion for the idea you want to solve. In both cases, there's always a lot to learn, but for the strength and vitality of an ecosystem, it's particularly important how we handle educating the first timers. 

I miss DartBoston.  Yes, there's a DartBoston still around today, but I miss Classic DartBoston. The group all about young and student entrepreneurs. I miss the energy of their Thursday night Pokin Holes events and the community it formed. I miss the one of a kind atmosphere that removed any fear from your first networking event and brought out a uber-high-caliber group of young entrepreneurs. Today's DartBoston is great with their flip cup and concerts, but it does not have the same effect of the Classic DartBoston days. That's why I miss DartBoston and if you care about student retention, you should too.

Our startup community is constantly evolving and we here at Greenhorn Connect work hard to stay in tune to those changes. When I started Greenhorn Connect, I was fresh out of Northeastern University and had the newcomer to the ecosystem in mind as we built the site. As the site and the ecosystem have since grown, my role in the community has changed significantly to serve much more than just the newcomer. At the same time, universities in town have changed the way they approach entrepreneurship as virtually every school has an incubator program, mentorship programs and vibrant student clubs.

Recognizing these changes at the universities and the need to build not only strong ties but understand the changing needs of students, I realized it was time to add some new student perspective to Greenhorn Connect. That’s why I’m pleased to announce the newest member of the Greenhorn Connect team: Paul Hlatky (pronounced “Lat-key”) as Director of Community and Student Relations.

Whether you interview customers regularly, watch support requests on HelpScout or use a GetSatisfaction or UserVoice - like tool, your startup is inundated with feature requests from your customers.  It's great to have them engaging, but can lead to the dreaded "feature creep" that leads to a bloated, unusable product. What's a startup to do? The answer may surprise you in its simplicity: use the 5 Why's.

Last week, I wrote about what I felt was Boston's startup identity. The goal was to help us crystallize who we are, what we're best at and what we have to offer to potential entrepreneurs looking to move to or otherwise join our ecosystem.  As important was the goal to expose what we're not.  The single biggest thing Boston is not is a good place for pure consumer internet plays.

Before you jump out of your seat, follow me for a moment...

Boston has an identity crisis. Like a bad startup, we're trying to be everything to everyone. But we're not and we perform a great disservice to ourselves by being in denial of who we really are. We must not only embrace our strengths and weaknesses, but proudly display them. Just like a good startup looking to recruit a good culture fit, you attract the best when you can clearly show them why they should join you. It's time we did this for Boston.

After spending the last 2.5 years in our ecosystem and visiting NYC and Silicon Valley's ecosystems, I'm going to take a stab at defining Boston's identity. (Special thanks to Bill Warner and others at the Nantucket Conference who discussed this months ago, but didn't quite complete crystallizing.)

If you've been following my Twitter stream @Evanish you know I'm visiting the Valley this week. As I wrote months ago, I think a startup in our interconnected world has to be TriCoastal. I've made a number of trips to New York City in the last year, but it was finally time to make a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley. I came to learn how much of the rumors that reach Boston are true and get a feel for what the real differences are between the two coasts.