PhD students should think like entrepreneurs

A few years into my PhD programme at Stanford University, I noticed something peculiar. While many of my peers felt overwhelmed by the lack of structure in academia, I found myself energised by it.

It wasn’t that I had any special advantage – I didn’t come from an academic family, nor did I have insider knowledge about how the system worked. But I had something else. I had an entrepreneurial mindset, one that I had learned long before I ever set foot in a university.

I immigrated to the US from the former Soviet Union when I was seven years old. My family arrived with almost nothing – four suitcases, no English and very little money. My parents, both engineers back home, had to rebuild their lives from scratch. They took whatever jobs they could find: my father worked in electrical manufacturing, my mother cleaned office buildings at night.

But they didn’t just wait for opportunities; they created them. They taught themselves new skills, bought and renovated rental properties to generate income, and figured out how to make the most of limited resources in an unpredictable world.

This was entrepreneurial thinking in action. And while I didn’t have the language for it at the time, I absorbed it. I learned that you don’t just follow a script – you figure things out as you go. You leverage what you have, take calculated risks and adapt when circumstances change.

Years later, when I entered academia, I realised just how much this mindset helped me thrive. Many of my peers were waiting for their advisers to guide them, for institutional structures to tell them what to do next. I took a different approach. I sought out mentors beyond my department, experimented with different forms of writing and public engagement, and treated my research as a problem-solving endeavour, not just an academic exercise. In short, I approached my PhD the way my parents had approached their new lives in America: as an opportunity to create something meaningful despite uncertainty.

But here’s the reality: academia today is uncertain. Even before scholarships and grant funding were thrown into chaos by the Trump administration, the traditional pathway from PhD to tenure-track job was increasingly fraught. And even for those who land academic positions, funding structures were precarious.

Institutions are changing, and the definition of scholarly success is evolving. It is no longer enough to make minor contributions to arcane fields of knowledge. Scholars must make meaningful contributions to real challenges. They must make connections across disciplines and sectors. They must adapt and contribute to the uncertain world beyond the ivory tower. In short, they need to think entrepreneurially.

To be clear, when I say “entrepreneurial”, I don’t mean that scholars should be chasing profit or turning universities into corporate ventures. Entrepreneurial thinking is about something much deeper: it’s about seeing opportunities where others see obstacles. It’s about recognising that, even within the rigid structures of academia, there are ways to carve out new intellectual spaces, build meaningful collaborations and bring research into the public sphere.

Most PhD students enter graduate school believing that success comes from being a good consumer of information: someone who reads widely, absorbs complex ideas and demonstrates intellectual mastery. While this is essential, it is not enough. A scholar’s job is not just to learn – it’s to create. And producing knowledge requires a completely different skill set from consuming it.

Scholars, much like entrepreneurs, are in the business of ideas. Yet the process of academic professionalisation often strips away the passion that originally drew them to research as it emphasises the importance of demonstrating correctly referenced knowledge of the literature and making incremental additions to it. Scholars’ challenge, though, is not just to publish but to ensure that their research remains driven by genuine curiosity and intellectual purpose.

Thinking entrepreneurially means asking questions such as “How can I use my research skills to engage broader audiences?”, “What collaborations can I build beyond my institution?”, “How can I leverage my expertise in ways that create new opportunities?” and “How do I define success on my own terms?”

When I first wrote about this perspective in an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed in 2021, I was surprised by the response. Graduate students wrote to tell me that they felt seen for the first time. Faculty members said they wished they had been taught to think this way earlier in their careers. Even a therapist who works with PhD students reached out, saying she planned to share the piece with her clients.

Academia is changing. The question is whether we, as scholars, are willing to change with it. The most successful academics of the future will not be those who simply follow old models, hoping they still work. They will be those who think creatively about their careers, who take ownership of their intellectual journeys, and who understand that scholarship itself is an act of entrepreneurship.

Ilana Horwitz is an assistant professor in the department of Jewish studies and Fields-Rayant chair in contemporary Jewish life at Tulane University. The Entrepreneurial Scholar is published on 11 March by Princeton University Press.