Two UNC graduates transfer skills to the business world

A crowd of about 50 graduate students and community members heard on Thursday from two alumni who took the entrepreneurial route after graduate school.

The event, part of the monthly Carolina Innovation Seminar series, featured Jeff Terrell and Rich Holloway, two UNC graduates who transferred their skills to the business world.

Terrell, who holds a doctorate in computer science from UNC, is the cofounder and chief technology officer of Altometrics, a cloud-computing managements company.

While Terrell was at UNC, he said he developed a program to measure computer server performance — an idea that he found could become a lucrative product after graduation.

Terrell said while his company is still seeking to make a profit, he is enjoying the experience.

“It is still ever the adventure,” he said. “We’re still on our journey, and we’re still learning a lot.”

Rich Holloway, vice president of medical imaging company Morphormics, highlighted the benefits of working at a small company and at a larger corporation.

Holloway said he has a diverse background, having worked at both large companies like Hewlett-Packard and in smaller companies such as Morphormics.

“You get to wear a lot of hats in smaller companies and then in large companies you can have more opportunities to do groundbreaking work because of their resources,” said Holloway.

Holloway also advised those going into the business world to keep the big picture in sight.

“As a grad student,” he said, “you learn to dissect problems to such a narrow level which helps you solve big problems.”

But sometimes if you don’t look at the big picture, you might solve the wrong problem.”

Both speakers discussed the risks that run with publishing original ideas at universities, which have control over students’ dissertations.

Holloway called the issue ‘publish and perish,’ since publishing at UNC would make it difficult to patent an idea after graduation.

John Bauman, a research scientist at Synereca Pharmaceuticals, said he attended the seminar to gain entrepreneurial knowledge for his company.

“I think that this seminar is a great platform for graduate students to start thinking about career development and alternative careers,” Bauman said.

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