From Lecture Halls to Startup Calls: The Journey of Being a University Founder

Degrees and Dreams

Balancing the demands of your studies with the challenges of building a startup is not a common path, yet it’s an incredibly rewarding one. More and more students are starting to ask themselves: “Why wait until graduation to create real impact?”

Being a founder while studying can (and will) be chaotic, exhausting and, at times, extremely overwhelming. But it provides a set of opportunities and learning experiences that a single place couldn’t give by itself. Universities provide a chance to be part of many communities to know like-minded people for whichever goal you may have, and the ecosystem always provides opportunities to connect with inspiring people.

In my case, I’m currently in my final year of the MSc in Computer Science and Engineering at NOVA FCT, engaging in the past in incredible initiatives that allowed me to grow in many ways.

Prior to University

I began building small businesses by the age of 17. I was a tutor from the 12th grade to the 2nd year of my BSc. I worked with over 60 students, from 5th to 12th grade, to help them achieve academic success. I was also into Marketing, and started to manage social media for a few organizations (including the baseball team I played for almost 9 years). My goal was to get a grasp for the fundamentals of building a small business and being able to grow it. Along the way, many mistakes were made, but it’s part of the game. If you come back to those same mistakes, that’s where it gets bad for you, because you’re simply not learning from them.

Every founder has a moment that triggers action. For many students, it’s the realization that university is more than lectures and exams, but a playground for ideas. The environment exposes us to diverse people, multidisciplinary thinking and problems just asking to be solved. Sometimes the spark comes from frustration, other times, from curiosity. What matters is the decision to build, rather than wait.

Junior Enterprises: The Training Grounds for Tomorrow’s Leaders

During the 2nd year of my BSc and before building SafetyScope, I joined a Junior Enterprise named In-Nova, an organization run entirely by university students. The core business of In-Nova is IT Consulting, where we developed websites, full-stack applications and performed robotics projects. It was in In-Nova where I got to build digital products for the first time.

Although it’s not directly the same as founding a startup, Junior Enterprises act as a sandbox for experimentation. You learn to manage teams, deal with clients, must meet deadlines and experience leadership dynamics.

In my case, I was a Projects Department Member, developing digital products, then became a Project Manager, managing teams to deliver projects to our clients, and then became Director of that same department, managing around 40 students. This type of experience with this level of experimentation isn’t easily available, so if you’re a student and read about an opportunity like this, grab it.

Currently, there are 27 junior enterprises in Portugal, engaged in a federation called Junior Enterprises Portugal, with over 1400 junior entrepreneurs generating a turnover over 600 thousand euros. This is a global movement. JE Portugal is part of JE Europe and JE Global, the latter with over 35 million USD in turnover with 23 thousand annual projects.

While most Junior Enterprises operate in consulting (IT, business, marketing, etc.), they’re valuable because they expose students to structured problem-solving and real-world responsibility early. Importantly, it gives you a taste of entrepreneurship. But grit, the relentless resilience required to be a founder, is largely intrinsic. The JE amplifies it, but it rarely creates it from scratch.

What Junior Enterprises Can Teach About Founding

When you’re a 1st time founder and currently studying, in your earliest stages you have to prove why you and your team are the best to solve a specific pain and explain why people should join you for the long term. Although we have incredible energy to move forward, we’re still very inexperienced in many ways. We should start from somewhere though.

JEs are not startups, but they instill professionalism, accountability, teamwork under pressure, client communication and product delivery mindset. These experiences reduce the shock of founding a company. When challenges appear, you respond with confidence because you’ve already tasted responsibility.

Still, the leap from JE to founder requires internal drive: persevering when no professor, manager or client holds you accountable, only your vision does.

How SafetyScope was Born

NOVA FCT has an Executive Education Program. Since my 1st year of the BSc I was eyeballing a course in Artificial Intelligence powered by Samsung Innovation Campus. I already knew Lucas (Co-Founder & CTO at SafetyScope) from my BSc and we decided to sign up for the course in our 2nd year. We were accepted and started what for us were the 5 longest months until the end. We were still studying in our main degree, Computer Science and Engineering.

After presenting our final project (a Machine Learning Approach to Detect Physical Violence in Video), me, Lucas and Francisco (former Co-Founder of SafetyScope) were faced with the question “What now?”. We still had a long way into our degrees, but it felt too good to just end the project there. That’s where SafetyScope was born.

The Hardest Challenges No One Warns You About

Once you’re in, the only way to go is forward. No one really prepares you for what it means to be fully immersed in building something from scratch, no matter your current situation.

What most people don’t tell you is that being a founder rewires you. Some things aren’t to be said, but felt and learned. Being a founder changes your tolerance for uncertainty. You stop expecting structure and instead begin creating it. You stop waiting for permission and you start moving even when things feel incomplete. You’re constantly thinking about the next step, the next risk, the next challenge.

When things go wrong, you’re not just failing a test, you’re failing something you built, something that carries a piece of who you are. Yet, paradoxically, it’s exactly in those moments that you grow the most.

Being a university founder requires navigating three fronts simultaneously:

• Academic pressure: Your assignments don’t pause just because you’re building.

• Time management: Every hour spent on your startup is an hour not spent studying, or resting.

• Mental resilience: Friends and family may not fully understand why you choose difficulty over comfort. Professors might not know how to support students who are building companies instead of simply consuming knowledge.

I’m truly lucky to be surrounded by people who understand and support us along the way.

The Grit Factor: The Personal Attribute No Curriculum Can Teach

At the core of entrepreneurship lies grit, the ability to keep pushing when everything suggests giving up. No course teaches it. No textbook captures it.

Being a student founder tests stamina (physically and psychologically), courage to take non-traditional career steps, humility when learning from failure and adaptability as everything changes weekly, or daily.

Beneath it all, most founders, though it’s rarely spoken out loud, carry a chip on their shoulder: a quiet need to prove something, either to themselves, their peers or to the world. It’s that inner tension that fuels the refusal to settle for just “good enough”.

Grit is about moving forward despite feeling doubtful and uncertain on how things might look up for the future. Every founder learns the hard way.

Support Systems That Matter (And Those We Still Need)

Along the way, I received help from mentors, entrepreneurial centers and networks. The most impactful support often came from events that connect students with founders and incubators willing to take risks on young talent like Madan Parque.

However, universities could do more:

• Introduce an entrepreneurship program or experience in each degree.

• Recognize startup work as academic credits.

• Offer legal/accounting/marketing support offices.

• Encourage cross-faculty collaboration.

I’m happy to be part of a university that is already taking real steps toward many of the points I’ve just mentioned. NOVA FCT hosts one of the largest Entrepreneurship Programs in Europe for students, and other NOVA campuses are also evolving, whether through dedicated degrees or core initiatives led by the NOVA Impact Office and the Haddad Entrepreneurship Institute. Each campus also has its own office focused on intellectual property and knowledge transfer, ensuring that research and innovation can move beyond academic walls and into the real world.

NOVA University has the largest number of Junior Enterprises in the country, with In-Nova (NOVA FCT), Junior Data Consulting (NOVA IMS), NOWACE (NOVA Medical School), and NOVA Junior Consulting (NOVA SBE). It also has incredible student-led entrepreneurship clubs such as START Lisbon (although independent, it’s led by many NOVA students), NOVAe and NOVA Startup Club, all of which play a vital role in introducing the entrepreneurial mindset across the university community.

This just shows that opportunities are everywhere, making the student-founder pipeline look significantly less intimidating.

Why Start Now?

There is no better moment than during university to build.

You are surrounded by brilliant peers. You get to challenge assumptions together with people that come from fields far outside your own. You can walk into a coffee break and walk out with a potential co-founder, a designer or your first beta tester.

Your learning curve is steep. Every mistake becomes a crash course in leadership, communication or self-discipline. You’re constantly forced to learn outside your academic comfort zone.

Your network grows faster than ever. Universities are fertile ground for serendipity: professors with industry connections, alumni eager to mentor, accelerators hunting for new talent.

But perhaps most importantly, starting now teaches you that building is learning. Every setback, every prototype, every conversation becomes part of your education.

The worst-case scenario? You learn skills 90% of students never touch. The best case? You create something truly meaningful.

So if you have an idea, don’t wait for the perfect moment. It doesn’t exist. Start where you are, with what you have. Because university isn’t just a place to study, it’s a place to start.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.