Our Philosophy

The Liberal Arts & Entrepreneurship

The world's hardest problems are complex, interdisciplinary, deeply human problems. They resist solutions from any single discipline, punishing narrow thinking and rewarding the ability to hold multiple frameworks in tension.

Amherst's Liberal Arts education builds the range needed to tackle world problems.

Amherst's open curriculum forces you to choose your own path and take ownership of your thinking. Students learn to move between disciplines, communicate clearly, and handle ambiguity, so when encountering a real problem, they are prepared to define it and actually do something about it.

Entrepreneurship is when the liberal arts meet a problem worth solving — the moment the question shifts from “what do I think about this?” to “what am I going to do about it?”

Despite our peers, Amherst College does not yet have an official platform exposing students to entrepreneurship — where they can build, fail, adapt, and learn to apply their education to solve world problems.

What's missing on campus is not people or experience, but a way to access it. Amherst has roughly twenty thousand living alumni. Among them are founders, investors, operators, and executives who built companies, scaled nonprofits, and led organizations across every sector. Until now, what hasn't existed is a structured way to connect this network to students who need it most.

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MAV Mission

Founded and funded by Amherst alumni, the MAV Foundation will encourage Amherst undergraduates to use their liberal arts education to imagine and create practical solutions to real-world problems. Our work will span the full arc of the entrepreneurial journey: from sparking initial curiosity in students who never imagined themselves as founders, to funding the solutions that prove themselves ready to scale. In doing so, we aim to make Amherst not just a place that educates undergraduates about the world, but also a community that actively seeks to give back to the world.

In practice, the Foundation will link Amherst students and their ideas to generations of Amherst alumni innovators. By providing students with a practical way to connect to alumni who have solved complex problems, navigated failure, and learned what it takes to bring something new into the world, MAV will create a living network where knowledge flows freely between generations.

Over time, the Foundation aims to make Amherst a place known not just for how its students think, but for what they go on to build.