Entrepreneurial Mindset. The key to success for undergraduate engineering students.

Engineers can no longer depend on just their technical skill set to be successful. They also need an entrepreneurial mindset. An entrepreneurial mindset (EM) encompasses attitudes, habits, and behaviors that shape a unique approach to problem-solving, innovation, and value creation.

The 3Cs of Entrepreneurial Mindset: Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value.
A thorough understanding of the 3Cs helps engineering students question, adapt, and make positive change in classes, campus, communities, and the world.

The Kern Family Foundation has catalyzed EM through KEEN: Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network.

All content in this post has been distilled from the Engineering Unleashed website.

Source: Engineering Unleashed

Why We’re In KEEN
We already embrace much of the KEEN Framework in our values and approach to engineering education. As a faculty, CEC has brought its own entrepreneurial mindset to our programs and initiatives. Discovery, inquiry, and synthesis are core values of the Mason student experience.

There are many examples of highly innovative programs we have created, such as:

• We created the first-ever BS in Cyber Security Engineering, and ABET modeled its program criteria after our curriculum.
• We pioneered a very creative dual-admission/transfer program for community college students, and approximately half of our 11,000 students follow that pathway to Mason.

AI can out-produce code, but it can’t connect the dots: 

How do you become a great [cybersecurity engineer]? You spend years as a junior, mid-level, and senior developer. You learn by doing, failing, and executing.

What we’ll desperately need are engineers who connect business risk, human behavior, and complex systems to anticipate the attacks nobody has scripted yet.

I’m convinced the answer is Entrepreneurially Minded Learning (EML), the framework developed by KEEN (the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network), built on a simple equation: Mindset + Skillset.

Curiosity (chase the context not given in the prompt). Connections (link technical decisions to other domains). Value Creation (security as business survival, not serverlocking).

Mindset alone doesn’t build judgment. Judgment used to come from a decade of breaking things as a junior.

EML has to do something harder than “teach curiosity”; it has to compress or replace the scar tissue that once came from years in the trenches.

Source: Engineering Unleashed

The goal is to use the GMU Cyber onAir hub and network of Cyber onAir hubs and especially the CYSE 587 Fall 2026 category as a dedicated repository where CYSE students can publish their ideas, refine their projects, receive feedback before Shark Events, and engage with the content.

Professor Barreto plans to use the onAir platform to share ideas on how EML can increase student engagement and better prepare them for the real-world problems they will face in the future and provides students with an innovative platform and gives onAir a concrete, active pilot to demonstrate its capabilities in a real-world academic setting.

What is the CYSE-587/SYST-687 Project?

The final project for CYSE 587/SYST 687 is a collaborative capstone experience designed to transform academic theory into a tangible, high-value solution. This is more than a standard assignment; it is an entrepreneurial journey that requires teams to navigate the complexities of real-world problem-solving.

At the start of the course, students will self-organize into teams of five to address a problem domain defined by the instructor. Your mission is not merely to provide a technical fix, but to innovate. Operating as a startup team, you will engage in a continuous cycle of experimentation, development, and iterative refinement.

Alexandre Barreto is an Associate Professor, Department of Cyber Security Engineering at George Mason University.

He has applied his significant experience as an air traffic and air defense infrastructure manager to a career specializing in the field of cybersecurity and networking, which in conjunction with his research on cyber impact assessment, has led to applications in cyber and transportation security, and decision support systems in defense and critical infrastructure areas. These topics are at the core of his classroom activities at both graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as his research path.

Barreto is a researcher in impact assessment and secure air transportation protocols and developed innovative applications and extensions that aid in the fight against cyber-warfare. He received his MS and PhD from Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica in Brazil.