“More graduates mean more Curalates”: Campus Philly Annual Meeting

Apu Gupta came to Philadelphia to attend Wharton and stayed in the city to build a startup called Curalate. In a year and a half, the company has grown from four employees to more than 30.

It’s a model that Campus Philly CEO Deborah Diamond hopes will repeat itself: college graduates turning into founders who employ dozens of Philadelphians.

“More graduates mean more Curalates,” Diamond said at Campus Philly’s recent annual meeting, during which she outlined the organization’s new strategic plan, recapped Campus Philly’s successes from the past year and moderated a panel on the arts, technology and business.

Diamond’s shout out to Curalate, the visual analytics startup in Center City, was another nod to Campus Philly’s growing interest in the local technology scene.

1. The organization has held several events in hopes of exposing students to the city’s startup culture
2. As well as coordinated a technology internship program backed by a city grant through tech funding project StartupPHL.
3. It’s the second year running that Diamond has called out a young local technologist, last year it was then-college entrepreneur Dan Shipper.
4. Campus Philly has also placed heavy emphasis on the arts, launching a program called Open Arts Philly that offers free and discounted tickets to arts events.

While STEM majors are on the rise in the city, Philadelphia still suffers from a “degree mismatch,” where colleges are churning out more industry-specific majors than than are jobs in those industries, and vice versa.

The Philadelphia region has seen a 20 percent increase in STEM majors from 2009 to 2012, Diamond said, quoting statistics provided by Select Greater Philadelphia. But in 2012, the region graduated more than 12,000 STEM majors while it created more than 58,000 “professional, scientific and technical, finance and insurance” jobs, according census data.