Our Fellowships

HOW IT WORKS

The Fellowship

A “fellowship” refers to any organized group that seeks to better understand and pursue a challenging topic.

The SELL Fellowship, the first of its kind for undergraduate students, consists of two semester-long stages: the Ideator and the Incubator.

The Ideator is the first step on one’s journey to become a social entrepreneur. It teaches social entrepreneurship basics and helps students form an idea to solve a social problem they care about.

Members who complete the Ideator are then inducted, given the title of “Junior Fellow,” and allowed to move on to the Incubator, where they launch a proof of concept and flesh out their venture. After completing the Incubator Fellowship, students receive the title of “Senior Fellow” where they continue to scale their venture.

All fellows receive lifetime membership to a community of changemakers who continuously support one another in the pursuit of social impact.

Fellowship Stages

Ideator

Part One: where social impact knowledge grows and ideation happens

Incubator

Part Two: where great ideas are proven and launched into reality

IDEATOR FELLOWSHIP

The Beginning of Your
Journey in Impact

The SELL Ideator Fellowship is an 8-week program designed to teach students about social entrepreneurship and guide them through the social impact research and ideation processes.

SELL Fellow Candidates in the Ideator research and ideate for a wide array of social challenges, the majority of which fit into one or more of the verticals below:

A Starting Point

Whether you want to become a full-blown entrepreneur or simply apply the SELL impact-first mindset to your life, this could be the beginning of an incredible & fulfilling journey in social impact.

Open to All

An idea, startup experience, or business background is not necessary to apply. SELL is a diverse & interdisciplinary organization – candidates need only bring themselves & their passions.

Centered on Research

We firmly believe that to build an idea that solves a social challenge, one must seek to deeply understand the challenge itself. As such, the Ideator emphasizes research as a means by which to ideate.

INCUBATOR FELLOWSHIP

The Beginning of Your
Journey in Impact

The second stage of the fellowship is an opportunity for fellows to test the ideas they developed in the Ideator. Once accepted into the Incubator, Junior Fellows must complete the following to become Senior Fellows.

  • Incubator fellows are guided through the product testing and development process – iterating proof-of-concepts and prototypes to ultimately reach Minimum Viable Product stage.

  • Incubator workshops, where SELL curriculum is taught, are twice per week for two hours each. The workshops are broken down into the following categories: Enterprise, Product, and Launch. First, fellows learn the practices and business fundamentals needed to build out an idea into a sustainable enterprise. Alongside building a fellow’s entrepreneurial acumen, they learn the essential principles of product design and development needed to build out Proof-of-Concepts, prototypes, and MVPs. Then, fellows are introduced to the tools and experiences that are common components of launching early-stage ventures.

  • As a Capstone event, all Incubator fellows and their respective teams compete in the SELL Your Impact: Pitch Competition. This provides fellows the opportunity to showcase their ventures and potentially earn funding to further their entrepreneurialism.

Final Events

SHOWCASING OUR IDEATORS

SELL Your Story Conference

SELL Your Story (SYS) Conference is a semesterly event where we showcase our Ideator fellow candidates their entrepreneurial idea and the work they've done to form it throughout this semester. It is a requirement that all student members must complete before being officially inducted into the Fellowship.

At SYS, each fellow candidate works at a small booth where they present their entrepreneurial idea to attendees, including UT Austin students, faculty, and guests.

THE INCUBATOR CAPSTONE

SELL Impact Pitch Competition

The SELL Your Impact (SYI) Pitch Competition, hosted by the SELL Fellowship every semester, is UT Austin’s largest social venture pitch competition for students creating their own social business models. This gives us the opportunity to showcase the work our Incubator Fellows have done over the past year as well as connect with others in the space.

This past semester, Incubator Fellow Nicole Wu won the competition and earned $1,000 in non-diluting funding. The runner-ups, Ivy Fan and Christine Dominic, won $650 and $450 respectively.