When it comes to experience, though, early entrepreneurs should broaden themselves. When you’re starting out, participate in a wide swath of activities to better understand each part of a business. Write a business plan. Code part of your site. Try testing the site. Present your pitch. Whereas a scientist knows how to do research, an entrepreneur must know how to do the research, the grant writing, the accounting, and the floor mopping.

Widening your experiences also teaches you what you’re not good at. When it comes time to build your perfect team, experience will tell you that maybe you’re not the best guy for accounting, even though you know how to do it. Find a rock star accountant as soon as you can.

In the spirit of this idea, here are the 5 ways I try to broaden my experiences:

1. Read.

I’m an RSS (and book) junkie. I read anything from typography and web standards to financing and marketing (and biographies, fiction novels, and an occasional book of the Core Curriculum variety).

2. Get out there.

I practice my message and get new material by going to NYC tech events. Try to find events that are targeted to your market but emphasize different parts of your market. I can’t say enough for Meetup to help with your search. NYC has several Meetup web groups, some specific to video, marketing, web standards, programming languages, etc. There are also sites that announce weekly events. For NYC, try Garysguide, NextNY’s calendar, and Silicon Alley Insider’s weekly posts.

3. Try it.

Enter Venture is just one way that I try out my ideas. I practice teasing out ideas on my whiteboard and rough site specs for feedback from friends. You can build a local version of your site to practice your coding skills. Open Photoshop, or Gimp and play with some color scheme ideas using tutorials on the web. Sign up to be a software tester at uTest.

4. Analyze.

I’ve been using Google Analytics, Feedburner, and WP Stats to track visitor usage and identify visitor trends. I’m in the midst of using Crazy Egg to better understand usage patterns on the site, which will help drive my next round of Enter Venture updates.

5. Improve.

If you follow #1-4, you should always be improving. Be aware of what you’ve improved on and celebrate it. Be, also, aware of what you need work on and work on it.

Start from #1 again.

(If there are any rock star accountants out there, let me know what you’re up to.)

1. It’s great to know how to teach one’s self
2. It’s great that there’s this thing called the “internets” to help

Point #2 is something I want to revisit later. Using the internet as a learning tool has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are obvious. You can search for anything and often, thanks to today’s search technology, find exactly what you’re looking for at the end of that long tail. The minuses, though, I think are less obvious and something I’d like to dedicate a longer post to. The internet has a time problem. We’ll just leave it at that.

Point #1 is the real reason for this post. Continuous education and self teaching are vital to the success of any early entrepreneur. It’s impossible for you to know at the outset everything you’ll need to know to be successful. Your success will be defined by your ability to continuously learn (and adapt, and get lucky once or twice).

Now, I have struggled for the past two years to better understand the value of my engineering degree. I have yet to really use the subject matter knowledge acquired from four years of biomedical imaging engineering. My single summer internship studying brain waves was fascinating, but a lifetime of working in hospital basements is not exactly what I’ve planned for myself.

What I’ve come to believe, and this past weekend substantiates this, is that an engineering degree teaches you the fundamentals to be a better self educator and problem solver. No matter what you go on to do after college, these fundamentals will help guide the way you improve, break down problems, and work with a team towards a solution.

Here are the 5 reasons I think my engineering education was crucial to my early entrepreneurship path. There’s certainly more, and I’d love to hear what other people think:

1. Self Education

I’m not sure if it’s by design or due to the general ineptitude of most engineering professors, but engineering tends to be really poorly taught. I certainly don’t blame the professors. Most of them were hired to do research. They simply aren’t there to engage you in the content, and the textbooks certainly don’t help.

You have to engage yourself in engineering. You have to find the right combination of study groups, office hours, and practice problems that work for you. You learn to focus and compile. You learn by doing.

The way we refer to ’studying’ before an engineering exam is probably a misnomer. More often, this time is spent practicing. Take that problem from Week 10 that you’re sure will be on the exam. Write out the solution step-by-step. Then, write it out again, but this time, change the numbers. Last, give yourself a final practice test by doing the problem without the book in front of you.

Even when you work out the answer to the equation, your job still isn’t done. Your next class will ask you to implement that solution with a program in Matlab. You’ll never know everything about Matlab and all of it’s functions so you better get used to digging around it’s help files and teaching yourself what you need to know along the way.

2. A Problem Solving Framework

I think the problem solving framework is best represented in an engineer’s final thesis or project.

My senior BME project team took on the following project: How could we create a portable set of underarm crutches to be used by sports trainers? We spent the first few months simply breaking down the problem. How small is portable? (Trainers typically carry duffle bags). How much weight must they support? (Accounting for the football team’s linemen, a lot). How much money do we have to build this prototype? (A little).

Once we knew the answers to these questions, we could think about solutions. Using our newly acquired Self Education skills we figured out the details for implementing.

(In case you’re wondering, we ended up building a crutch made of hinged aluminum segments with a wire running through the center that could be tightened and released to extend and fold the crutch. Cool stuff.)

3. Finishing spirit

It’s incredibly hard to get partial credit in engineering. Say you have a Java assignment that’s due at 9am on Friday morning. You could spend every waking hour from the Sunday night prior working on that assignment. You’ll make all kinds of mistakes, get sidetracked by random problems, but still find incremental improvements. What every engineering student knows, though, is if their program doesn’t run at 9am on Friday morning, it’s all for naught. Everything has to work when you hit ‘Enter’. I think it’s this feeling that keeps us up the night before. Success is relatively binary.

4. Side-by-side work

I can’t speak for every major, but one of the best things about BME was working side-by-side with professors and TAs during projects and labs. You can learn so much more than answers to problem sets this way. You see their passion and technique. How do they hold their instruments? How do they comment their code? It’s typically worth emulating.

I don’t think this extends outside of engineering all that often. Your poetry professors can’t write an example poem with you looking over their shoulder. Your ChemE professor can run that experiment though. Your CS professor can dazzle you with that on-the-spot ‘Hello world’ program in CS1007.

5. Teamwork

This was a bit of a late edition to the post. It’s also different than reason #4. Side-by-side work has more to do with emulating the best than working with a team of your peers.

I’m not entirely convinced that my engineering degree helped instill an appreciation for teamwork that I didn’t already have. Twenty years of team sports had already taught me most of what engineering school reinforced. If you haven’t had a similar experience, count this as an important reason #5.

I can remember a conversation my lab team once had with a graduate teaching assistant during some downtime in senior lab. He was a BME PhD student with a BS in MechE. He told us that if he had to do it all over again, he would have been a BME student from undergrad onwards. Obviously he just wished he could have spent another 4 years of his life talking about BME, I thought, but that wasn’t it. Instead, he told us that a BME degree would allow us to do anything. If you didn’t like medicine and biology, you could leverage your EE and CS classes. If you didn’t like those, you could leverage all of those math classes. If you didn’t like those, well, you could just fake it.

As I’m writing this now, I think his words ring true for practically any engineering major. Engineering isn’t about finding the right path over the course of a short, immature 4 year period of your life. Engineering is about learning how to learn, learning how to problem solve, and learning how to improve.

Thanks Columbia. (I never thought I’d say that before I finished paying the bill).

While we often talk about how great it is to be a nimble startup, the reality is that early businesses faces the biggest hurdles, the most fundamental constraints. There isn’t enough money to pay for everything. There aren’t enough people to do the job. Success is completely dependent on you and the way you decide to deal with these constraints.

Succeeding in spite of these odds is what makes us love entrepreneurs. Especially in the startup world, people love the struggling success story. Startup lore is filled with the guys who’ve built computers in their garage, written software at night after a full day of work, lived off of ramen and in their parents’ basement. No one roots for the juggernaut.

Without resources, early entrepreneurs have to learn to embrace these constraints and succeed in spite of them. If you don’t have money, figure out how much you can do without it. Better yet, figure out how to convince people to give you money. If you start your business with someone you meet on the internet on the other side of the globe, make efficient communication and 24/7 support your forte. If you don’t know where to start, start a blog.

Success is part creativity and part skill, but 100% owed to passion. The passionate will persevere and stick around long enough to trump any lack of skill or creativity.

This weekend I attended Salem State College’s 198th graduation ceremony and heard a booming, passionate commencement speech by Prof. Charles Ogletree of Harvard University’s School of Law. His words were funny, serious, and inspiring — everything you could hope for out of at commencement. At one point, Prof. Ogletree talked about the real driver of American strength (roughly 4 minutes into the video):

America today is not measured by the graduating class at Harvard. It’s measured by the graduating class of Salem Sate College. You are the single mother, raising children, cooking dinner, and reading course materials, all in the same night last week … You are the student working two jobs … You are the one who despite the skepticism of your friends and buddies, returned to college as an older student and stand here today proud of the fact that you’ve made it.

In the crowd listening to Prof. Ogletree at Salem State College’s 198th graduation ceremony, sat my Mom. She was listening to Prof. Ogletree while preparing to accept her diploma in spite of 20 years, 3 colleges, 4 kids, 1 husband, and numerous jobs. She persevered, dedicated herself to her goal, embraced her constraints, and now rightfully takes her place in successful, entrepreneurial lore. Congrats Mom.

I’d also like to welcome Vik Venkatraman to Enter Venture. Vik and I both studied Biomedical Engineering at Columbia, lived to tell the tale, and have run from the field ever since. After seeing his few posts on The Starving Entrepreneur, I knew I had found a kindred entrepreneurial spirit and we’ve shared experiences ever since.

He recently volunteered to share his content and continue blogging about early entrepreneurs on Enter Venture, and I couldn’t be more excited to add another blogger to the team (and by team I mean there are now 2 of us). His first post should give you an idea of what to expect. Vik should complement my posts well with a less web-centric, but more complete view of what it’s like to be an early entrepreneur. Welcome aboard, Vik!