Vision, Mission, Why

Our Vision

ESTEEM aspires to be one of the world's premier graduate programs in technology and entrepreneurship with global reach and impact. We will be a platform, an engine, and a launch pad for translating:

  • Students into Change Agents
  • Teaching into Impact
  • Learning into Action
ESTEEM will be built on the global, institutional firepower of the University of Notre Dame, a top 15 university, and its vision, strategy, resources, and focus on the commercialization of research and technology through innovation and entrepreneurship.

Our Mission

ESTEEM will deliver its Vision by building the most realistic entrepreneurial sandbox in higher education in which students will create, design, build, fail, pivot, iterate, and perhaps even launch and scale, all with a focus on fixing things that matter.

Creating Culture: Cultivate diverse, dynamic teams of faculty, staff, and students who can operate and thrive in a rapidly changing, fast-paced environment, always driven by an attitude of “Let’s just try it!”

Creating Community: Develop deep, individual relationships between students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the broader Notre Dame family. 

Creating Confidence: Foster a belief in oneself as a change agent, an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, and a catalyst for impact.

Creating Experiences: Deliver a world-class curriculum and out-of-the-building learning opportunities that channel the resources, infrastructure, and facilities of a world-renowned university to create a high-quality, hands-on, personal educational experience for every student.

Creating Expectations: Build diverse cohorts of gifted students with backgrounds in engineering, science, math, economics, the social sciences, and design, all of whom aspire to think big, deliver impact, and grow to be as comfortable in the boardroom as they are in the lab, on the bench or writing code.

Creating Exposure: Focus on networking and professional development through the formulation of a personal launch strategy, a lifelong engagement with possibly the most powerful, loyal, and helpful alumni base in the world, the wider Notre Dame family, and a global community of innovators and entrepreneurs.

Our Why

The ESTEEM Graduate Program, built on the powerful platform that is the University of Notre Dame, exists to enable and empower our students to discover, define, develop — and ultimately fulfill — their own personal “Why” through a lifelong engagement with innovation and entrepreneurship.

ESTEEM is built upon, captures, and leverages the Catholic faith, tradition, character, and core mission of the University to pursue and share truth for its own sake, all in order to deliver on Father Sorin's vision of being a ”…powerful force for good in the world…” through innovation and entrepreneurship.

Commitment to our Students:

We aspire to:

  • Catalyze transformational growth.
  • Inspire young minds to fix things that matter.
  • Build entrepreneurial confidence in our students — as young innovators, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and servant leaders.  We want our students to dream big — to create, disrupt, deliver, execute, scale, inspire — all to advance the Common Good, all from the depths of their minds, their souls, their hearts — their Whys.

Commitment to our Community:

We aspire to engage, elevate, and scale the emerging ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University by:

  • Delivering impact through job creation and long-term economic growth through our students’ lifelong engagement with innovation and entrepreneurship.
  • Being a catalyst, a bridge, and a builder across:
    • Disciplines, Institutes, and Colleges at Notre Dame.
    • Regional, National, and Global communities.