The Texas Institute for Discovery Education in Science (TIDES) aims to catalyze, support, and showcase innovative, evidence-based undergraduate science education in the College of Natural Sciences. TIDES serves a variety of connected roles: creating and connecting students to experiential learning opportunities; facilitating curriculum reform efforts and faculty development across the sciences; and collecting, curating, and analyzing data to steer TIDES and college evaluation efforts.

The Texas Proof of Concept (POC) Awards provide internal funding to researchers on a competitive basis. Awards serve as a bridge to demonstrate the feasibility of a technology to either attract a commercial partner through licensing or validate the case for establishing a startup. POC Awards (up to $25K) and Texas+ POC Awards (up to $125K in 1:1 match) are focused on helping de-risk inventions to an inflection point in value. Click Learn More for details on the current application cycle.

Founded in 2010, the Texas Venture Labs Accelerator is a zero-cost, zero equity program that connects Texas startups with multi-disciplinary graduate student teams. These students provide up to 200 hours of high impact business consulting each spring and fall semester. We accept applications from both early stage and growth stage startups who can clearly define meaningful projects to help accelerate growth and are committed to engaging with the student team.

Texas Venture Mentoring Service (TEXVMS) has assembled over 100 expert mentors to support startups in the many entrepreneurship programs at UT Austin. TEXVMS's intensive team mentoring methodology surrounds startups with diverse expertise tailored to each company's unique needs. Mentors provide practical, actionable advice with a focus on developing the entrepreneur. Startups with any UT Austin connection may apply: university IP, faculty/student founder, or participation in another UT program.

The Three Minute Thesis competition celebrates the exciting research conducted by graduate students. Developed by The University of Queensland (UQ), the exercise cultivates students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills. The competition supports their capacity to effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

Venture Fellows is a year-long program for a selected group of MBA students. Applicants must be enrolled in the McCombs MBA program. For one spring and one fall semester, students work for a venture capital firm, private equity firm, or local incubator or accelerator in conjunction with a weekly class.

A state-of-the-art facility where staff explores the intersection between human perception and large-scale visual analysis through the study of visualization and interactive displays. The Vislab serves as a research hub for human-computer interaction, tiled display software development, and visualization consulting. The Vislab offers opportunities to UT faculty, staff, and students to use visualization, interaction, and computational resources for the exploration and presentation of data. 

UT Austin students interning at a startup or working in an entrepreneurial venture may be eligible to enroll in EXP 000 (undergrad) or EXP 080 (grad), the university's zero-credit internship and experiential learning course. This is a tuition-free course with self-paced experiential activities that help students reflect and build upon their experience. As a benefit, this course maintains enrollment for students who do not plan to enroll in other courses while participating in the experience.