Create your own path. Be the driver of your future career. Combine your passion for creativity or desire to create change with your work in the classroom. Inspire others with your creative work or solutions to real world problems.

What are entrepreneurial and creative endeavors?

Students learn to set their own course by having experiences in early stage start-ups, advancing ideas to solve real world problems, or create artistic, written or performance-based projects. 

DifferenceMakers By the Numbers

  • $5M
    raised by teams
  • 40
    companies formed by teams
  • 11
    Number of teams patents filed or issued

Meet the DifferenceMakers

UML Green Roofs is attempting to provide secure green outdoor locations for the students at UMass Lowell.
UML Green Roofs
DifferenceMakers

UML Green Roofs is attempting to provide secure green outdoor locations for the students at UMass Lowell.

UML Green Roofs will implement ecologically friendly outdoor study spaces around campus.
Read More About UML Green Roofs 
Jonathan Aguilar talking with two students at a desk
Jonathan Aguilar '21
Mechanical Engineering

Jonathan Aguilar ’21 started a 3D printing company as an undergrad that he now runs at the Haverhill Innovation Hub.

It feels great to be able to apply what I learned in school in the real world.
Read More About Jonathan Aguilar 
Team Next Gen Testing posing for a picture with Brian Rist and Holly Lalos after receiving an award.
Next Gen Testing
DifferenceMakers

Developing a solution that consists of an impurity concentrator and a reverse osmosis filter to detect and localize the impurities in water.

Next Gen Testing is developing a solution that consists of an impurity concentrator and a reverse osmosis filter to detect and localize the impurities in water.
Read More About Next Gen Testing 
Nicholas Norcross and Kevin Seery onstage with Steve Tello, Holly Butler and their “Significant Social Impact” award at the 2018 DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge, a $4,500 prize they are using to develop their ClassRoots application platform
ClassRoots
DifferenceMakers

ClassRoots is an organization striving to facilitate connections between students in the classroom and to share this with their instructors.

Now more than ever, having a college education is extremely important. And with the rising cost of college tuition, academic success is very important.
Read More About ClassRoots 
Prototype of NavLens, which resembles a modern version of eye glasses.
NavLens, Sutherland Innovative Technology Solution
DifferenceMakers

NavLens will help those who are visually impaired by providing navigation in these unfamiliar areas as well as supplemental audio-visual cues to avoid obstacles.

“NavLens will help those who are visually impaired.”
Read More About NavLens, Sutherland Innovative Technology Solution