Episode 92: Laura Hassner (and students!) on How to Be a Changemaker
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How can the right combination of curiosity, collaboration, community, and classes equip students to be changemakers? How can you expand the definition of and participation in entrepreneurship and what are the outcomes? How is AI changing education and work to prepare students for change? We dive into these questions with Cornell Suhartono, current Berkeley student, Samiha Singh former student and now a McKinsey consultant, and Laura Paxton Hassner Executive Director of the Berkeley Changemaker® program.
The old Silicon Valley narrative suggests that if you want to be a successful founder, you have to drop out of college. From Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, the "hoodie-wearing dropout" has become the gold standard for innovation. But at UC Berkeley, a new movement is proving that the most powerful startups aren't born in a vacuum—they are nurtured within a connected, academic community.
The Berkeley Changemaker program has transformed from a single class of 500 students into a campus-wide phenomenon with over 10,000 enrollments in just five years. By combining critical thinking, communication, and collaboration, the program is proving that staying in school actually increases your "ability to impact."
In this discussion, we explore how Berkeley is dismantling silos and equipping the next generation of leaders to navigate the age of AI with empathy, resilience, and a deep sense of agency.
Redefining Student Success Through Impact and Agency
Traditionally, student success has been measured by GPA or graduation rates. While Berkeley Changemaker students do boast significantly higher graduation rates—79% for first-generation freshmen compared to 69% for the general population—the program defines success through a much wider lens.
For students like Cornell Suhartono and Samiha Singh, success isn't just about a diploma; it’s about the ability to create long-term societal benefit. It’s about "making others happy" and building teams that feel like family. Success is the realization that small, tactical steps—like pushing yourself to attend a mixer where you feel out of place—can lead to massive shifts in your career trajectory.
The Power of a Connected Entrepreneurial Mindset
The term "entrepreneurship" can often feel narrow and exclusive. Many students don't see themselves as "founders." The Berkeley Changemaker program solves this by offering an inclusive lens through 45 academic classes across the humanities, engineering, and business.
By rebranding the entrepreneurial mindset as "Changemaking," the university has created a resonant identity. Students aren't just taking classes; they are "Berkeley Changemakers." This sense of belonging is a powerful catalyst for success. When students feel they belong to a community of like-minded peers and mentors, they are more likely to navigate the university's vast resources effectively.
Leading with Empathy in the Age of AI
As generative AI changes the landscape of productivity, the human element becomes even more critical. While AI can handle manual, tedious tasks and supercharge productivity, the "Changemaker" approach emphasizes the qualities AI cannot replicate: empathy and emotional intelligence.
Berkeley students are learning to use AI as a tool to stretch their thinking rather than a replacement for it. In a world where technical skills are increasingly commoditized, the "qualitative aspects" of business—understanding a client's personal passions, listening deeply, and building genuine relationships—become the true competitive advantages.
Lessons in Resilience: Navigating the Future of Higher Ed
Institutional change often requires "busting silos" and forging partnerships. The Berkeley Changemaker program itself was built like a startup: prototyped, tested, and scaled. The key takeaway for other higher education leaders is the importance of making students aware of the resources available and then getting out of their way.
When students are equipped with a sense of agency, they stop waiting for permission to change the world. They start where they are, use the tools at their disposal, and build the future one small step at a time.
Episode 92 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers. Welcome Laura, Cornell, and Samiha. I'm really excited about all the different perspectives you're gonna bring on entrepreneurship and the role that it plays in student success.
Laura Paxton Hassner: Thanks for having us. I am the strategic advisor to the Chancellor here at the University of California Berkeley. I also hold the titles of Executive Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Berkeley Changemaker Academic Program. Berkeley Changemaker started out of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Our team came together and what we were really trying to solve for was the challenge that entrepreneurship is such a narrow word, and so few of our students see themselves as included in it.
Cornell Suhartono: Hi, my name's Cornell. I'm currently a junior at UC Berkeley, studying both business and economics. I call myself a Berkeley Changemaker. I've ran a couple different kinds of ventures ranging from a clothing company to a B2B AI SaaS company.
Samiha Singh: My name is Sam. I graduated from Berkeley in 2024. I studied computer science and business. Currently I'm an analyst at McKinsey and Company and on the entrepreneurship side, I was very involved with startups on campus.
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Cornell Suhartono: For me success is pretty simple. Something a statement that my dad constantly says, and that is to make others happy. I view running a company, not just by creating a product, but essentially creating a team, a family, because they're family and you have to make them happy as well as your customers. Seeing how people want to be part of our culture—to us that is success.
Samiha Singh: When I think of student success I think of three main things: learning, community, and happiness. A big part of my life was just following my curiosity and being guided by that, and a love for learning rather than focusing on outcomes per se. I think that has always led to greater effort and greater outcomes as a result.
Laura Paxton Hassner: Long-term societal benefit is really what we're aiming at as a university. We're seeing that this inclusive lens and entrepreneurial thinking is activating this generation. Normative graduation rates for our transfer students is 65% for those who take Berkeley Changemaker classes versus 56% for the general population. For first-generation freshmen, we see a 79% graduation rate versus 69%.
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Samiha Singh: Most importantly, what I will always be grateful to Berkeley for is the community that I was able to get. We have a vast network of people at Berkeley. It's a large school, but through things like the Berkeley Changemaker program, I was able to find really strong relationships, strong mentors and peers who have contributed so positively to everything that I've done.
Laura Paxton Hassner: Our students are building the community for themselves. I'm hearing again and again from students: I met my best friend in a Berkeley Changemaker class. I met my roommate in a Berkeley Changemaker class. I met my co-founder in one of these classes.
Cornell Suhartono: That stigma of saying, "Hey, if you wanna be successful being a student founder, you should drop out," I don't think that's true. I think being in a place with the right culture and the right community, we as students are able to succeed as a startup founder. It gives all those resources to founders without having to drop out.
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Samiha Singh: In consulting especially, I think AI has become a tool that just supercharges productivity. It helps me personally by delegating manual, tedious tasks and freeing up my time for more critical thinking. Something I personally fear is us becoming so reliant on AI and starting to delegate thinking and creativity to it, but mostly it's been super positive.
Cornell Suhartono: I think the next trends in the next few years involve innovations towards the emotional intelligence part of AI. Although it's very scary, I think that's gonna be the future now. How can someone create that AI companion, whether it is in a workforce or in a personal sense.
Laura Paxton Hassner: Within the Berkeley Changemaker we have courses like Ethical and Effective Entrepreneurship in High Tech. I wanna make sure that we also integrate ethics into the conversation. One of our most popular new classes is a course called Applied Resilience.
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Samiha Singh: Berkeley is very rigorous; it prepares you for any kind of change. We're constantly adapting to change. I remember as part of the Berkeley Changemaker suite of courses, I had a class that encouraged us to use AI for homework in a way that challenges our thinking, stretches our mind, and asks critical questions. Those exercises prepared me for the workplace.
Cornell Suhartono: Berkeley really pushes people in adapting to change. One thing Laura did very well in her class, Living with Agency, is giving really simple, essential ideas to life. One of the main ideas I go by every single day is the idea of empathy. Little things like that differentiate a startup founder—all of these qualitative aspects are super important to one's character.
Laura Paxton Hassner: A student's ability to impact is equal to a simple equation: their ability to navigate our resources multiplied by the number of resources we have available. What we have to do is make our students aware of the resources, connect them to them, and then get out of their way so that they can enact the change that is most important to them. Help provide students with the ways to name their own value.