EY Student Pitch Perfect

Entrepreneurship opportunities often engage a relatively narrow group of students: those who already identify as entrepreneurial, who have time beyond their studies, or who are studying in disciplines where enterprise is more visible. Pitch Perfect: Students Start Up has been developed to challenge this pattern by embedding entrepreneurship within the academic experience itself.

By enabling students to repurpose existing coursework as the starting point for venture ideas, the initiative lowers the barrier to participation. A strong assignment, a creative project, or a practical solution developed for a module can become the foundation of something more, rather than ending when the deadline passes. In this way, students are encouraged to see how their academic work can translate into real-world opportunity.

For students, this is intentionally positioned as an inclusive, exploratory experience rather than a high-pressure startup competition. There is no expectation that participants arrive with fully developed business ideas or intentions to launch a company. The focus is on building confidence, helping students recognise the potential in their work, and developing transferable skills such as ideation, problem framing and pitching.

This project is designed to support both teaching practice and student development. For staff, it offers a practical way to connect assessment more clearly to real-world contexts, to embed applied and authentic learning, and to provide students with opportunities to extend their academic work beyond the classroom. 

The current phase of the launch is focused on engaging staff, allowing time to consider how this initiative might align with module learning outcomes and assessment strategies. This initiative has been shaped around the realities of teaching, assessment design, and staff workload. It does not require the creation of new modules or wholesale changes to existing programmes. Instead, Pitch Perfect: Students Start Up offers a flexible, adaptable framework that can be integrated into current modules in ways that make sense for different disciplines and levels of study.

Staff are supported with ready-made rubrics and plug-in assignment formats that can be aligned with existing learning outcomes and assessment strategies. This provides a structured way to embed enterprise-oriented learning while preserving academic standards and disciplinary integrity. 

The student-facing launch will follow in September 2026 when students will have access to a series of workshops on each campus aligned to key stages of the entrepreneurial journey, including ideation and pitch development.