Guitar Hero III was created by Vicarious Visions–a company founded by a Rensselaer graduate.
	Rensselaer’s prominent alumni/ae business leaders include... Wanda Densen-Low ‘77, senior vice president, The Boeing Company Dr. Claire Fraser-Liggett ‘77, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences Arthur Gajarsa ‘62, Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals John E. Kelly III ‘78, senior vice president and director of research, IBM Corporation Mark Little, Ph.D. ‘82, senior vice president and director of GE Global Research Albert Lowenthal ‘67, chairman and CEO of Oppenheimer Don McMurtry ‘86, former vice president of Research in Motion, creators of the BlackBerry Jim Mullen ‘80, CEO of Pantheon Richard Spillane Jr. ‘72, retired executive vice president for Fidelity Investment Company Sean O‘Sullivan ‘85, founder and former president, MapInfo Jackson Tai ‘72, retired chief executive officer of DBS Bank, Singapore’s largest bank

Embracing Risk – Driving Change

Like our faculty, Rensselaer students are encouraged to pursue creativity and discovery for the pure joy of it — and the results are often spectacular. Our undergraduates embrace risk and drive change in ways that have transformed how the world works, plays, and lives.

An Impressive Rolodex

The video game giant Vicarious Visions once operated out of a Rensselaer residence hall. Drawing one-third of its employees from Rensselaer’s graduate pool, the company creates such successful video games as Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, and Spider-Man 3.

Rensselaer alumni have launched dozens of other prominent and successful businesses. Osborn Engineering, which has designed more than 100 U.S. sports stadiums, including the original Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park, was established by a Rensselaer alumnus. Gary Burrell ’63 co-founded Garmin International, a world-class manufacturer of GPS navigation systems.

Growing Businesses

Revolutionary ideas — and successful businesses — spring from every corner of Rensselaer’s campus. Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranked the financial management and corporate strategy program at our business school, the Lally School of Management & Technology, as the best in the nation.

The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences offers a program in Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences which was ranked fifth in game design programs in 2010 in the U.S. by the Princeton Review.

Building on decades of successful efforts to nurture new businesses and bring ideas from classrooms and labs to the marketplace, Rensselaer launched, in February 2011, a distributed incubation program to help young businesses grow and succeed: the Emerging Ventures Ecosystem (EVE).

EVE builds on more than 30 years of the Institute’s previous incubator program, the nation’s first such program wholly sponsored and operated by a university.

As a student entrepreneur you have access to a myriad of resources starting with over 100 entrepreneurial related classes to lab facilities where you can test your ideas and build prototypes, to faculty and business advisors who can help shape and guide you to success, and even funding sources from grants, business plan competitions and possible Angel investments.