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

The ETRALock team onstage pitching to DifferenceMaker judges
ETRALock
DifferenceMakers

ETRALock is a team focused on helping individuals with physical limitations, get into their homes using smart locks with simple proximity activation.

Individuals with certain motor skill impairments such as arthritis, Parkinson’s, and ALS find it difficult and painful when entering or leaving their own homes due to the motions necessary to complete the task.
Read More About ETRALock 
Group photo featuring Ariel Shramko, Renin Jose, and Eliot Pirone.
Terminus
DifferenceMakers

Terminus will solve the problem of food insecurity in the USA and beyond by by creating a system of multiple, stackable units that can grow food anywhere.

“Terminus will solve the problem of food insecurity in the USA and beyond.”
Read More About Terminus 
Hylton Carboo, Cassandra Francois and Bernard Tay smile by their T.A.P. poster at a DifferenceMaker event
T.A.P.
DifferenceMakers

Teach A Pal, otherwise known as T.A.P., is a team dedicated to helping student success through peer involvement.

Students deserve a better way to connect and help one another with their studies, and to help them be successful in their college experience.
Read More About T.A.P. 
RE-VIVE team members Derek Jamieson, Nicholas Lydon and Alison Michell pose with their Honorable Mention award and Holly Butler
RE-VIVE
DifferenceMakers

RE-VIVE aims to lessen the fatalities associated with the opioid epidemic. The product consists of a wearable auto-injection system to administer Naloxone to those suffering from a drug overdose.

RE-VIVE will be the first responder for an immediate resolution to an incoming overdose.
Read More About RE-VIVE 
UMass Lowell Image
Mayday '15
DifferenceMakers

Mayday upon activation can reach all emergency contacts in just a tap.

Mayday will give people a piece of mind.
Read More About Mayday