Fifteen years of the Hatchery
Left to right, back row standing: Kerri Sands ’02, Jay Friedlander, Lila Foster ’26, Yuri Tsuji ’25, Rūdy Lukaševičs ’25, Uriel Orozco Brenes ’26, Raheem Khadour ’25, Mustafa Khorzom ’25; middle row kneeling: Sami Rose ’25, Adler Garner ’26, Shea Turner-Matthews ’26; front: Madi Person ’24
The Diana Davis Spencer Hatchery allows students to walk the entrepreneurial high wire with a safety net and support. While higher education frames success as the be-all and end-all in the real world, trial and error, intermittent success, and sometimes failure are the most effective teachers; we constantly have to adjust, reframe, and reboot through the rest of our careers and lives. The Hatchery encourages students to think on their feet, pivot when things are not working, and adapt to new environments—all skills increasingly important in the age of AI.
Established in 2010, the Hatchery is COA’s sustainable enterprise accelerator, helping students create impact by testing and launching their own ventures. In 2015, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation endowed the program with a $1.5M grant and it was renamed in Diana’s honor.
Students enter the Hatchery in spring term. It is the only course they take and consists of 10 weeks of rapid refinement and testing. The Hatchery approach is unique among liberal arts colleges. Most incubator programs in colleges and universities exist outside of a student’s course load as something they do on the side. By offering a full term of academic credit for the program, the Hatchery aligns the entrepreneurial and educational interests of students, allowing them to start enterprises because of their education.
“The Hatchery fuses academic learning with a student’s personal passion, producing exponential energy, engagement, and learning. Ostensibly, the Hatchery provides students a toolkit for creating new enterprises. However, that is the tip of the iceberg. Students also leave with a perspective and approach that embraces problem solving with experimentation, testing, and refinement. In many ways, the Hatchery is a reflection of the long history of engaged scholarship at COA. I feel fortunate to work at a college where, in almost every academic area, students are combining theory and practice to engage with the world around them.”
“COA students are fired up to discover ways to improve our communities and world. I love that the Hatchery offers practical skills to help them achieve their vision. Hatchery students learn how to identify opportunities, listen carefully to stakeholder needs, communicate possibilities, assess feasibility, and provide value. Critically, they learn to iterate and test their ideas in small steps so they can work toward meaningful long-term success and that is the art of life!”
