Gates’ entrepreneurial exploits are the stuff of university legend. He was still an undergraduate marketing major working in the alumni office when he conceived his idea of Gates Communications, a company focused on college media and marketing. While at Radford, he and another RU entrepreneur founded and ran a successful alternative student newspaper.

Having successfully sold Gates Communications, he joined a fledgling dot-com that connected employers with college students. That company, JobDirect, pioneered many of the job-matching tools used in recruiting today while winning national awards for its marketing efforts. “JobDirect made quite a splash on college campuses,” says Kathryn Jordan, director of RU’s Center for Experiential Learning and Career Development. JobDirect was sold to Korn-Ferry International, the largest recruitment firm in the world, in a deal that gave Gates the freedom to pursue other ideas.

It turns out, according to Jordan, that the National Survey of Student Engagement reveals RU students to be exceptionally social, a characteristic, she notes, that research clearly links to career success.

When Gates joined the university’s Business Industry Council and started talking with other business leaders about how they could enliven students’ experiences, he thought about his own Radford experience. For him, having been “politely asked by the university to take a break from school” had been a good thing. While getting his academic priorities straight, his work and other activities gave him knowledge and confidence to try things on his own after returning to RU. “For what I do,” says Gates, “the best preparation came through my own activities,” such as running a newspaper business.

Looking around at his fellow alumni, it seemed to him that a higher proportion than one might expect were involved in entrepreneurial pursuits. He set out to figure out why and to determine whether his observations applied to current RU students. A characteristic he found with ease among alumni entrepreneurs was sociability. For example, “in high school,” says Gates, “I was at the bottom of my ad-vanced class. Why? Because I’m very social.”

It turns out, according to Jordan, that the National Survey of Student Engagement reveals RU students to be exceptionally social, a characteristic, she notes, that research clearly links to career success. RU is an “engaged campus,” says Jordan, “where students are good at mixing academic and extracurricular activities” and are encouraged to do so.

Jordan says approximately one-third of RU students are first-generation college students, paying for their own education and wanting to pull their siblings along with them. “They are motivated to succeed,” she says, “and they are oriented to the bottom line.” Successful entrepreneurs, like these family pioneers, tend to be independent, want control over their environment and tolerate risk well.

A little over a year ago Gates proposed to his fellow Business Industry Council members an Entrepreneurial Engagement Task Force. “There is an entrepreneurial spirit already here,” he told them. “What we need to do is encourage and stimulate it.”

He went to see Kathryn Jordan.

“Entrepreneurship is a way of life, rather than a discipline,” says Gates. “It’s a career path in itself.” It made sense to base his efforts in Jordan’s office rather than any specific academic area, even business.

Gates and Jordan developed a loose plan and a timeline and presented their ideas to a national gathering of the Cooperative Education and Internship Association. Their timeline included identifying students with likely entrepreneurial personalities through career assessments and interviews, bringing entrepreneurial speakers to campus and networking to develop internship site placements.

They realized that whatever plan they developed needed to start with students.

“What we didn’t anticipate,” says Jordan, “was a simultaneous expression of interest by a student. That was Mike Clark.”