While many are enjoying their summer break or working at summer internships, two MechE students are paving their own way, working to realize their own business ventures with support from Innovate@BU’s Summer Accelerator.
The Summer Accelerator is a 10-week intensive program offering mentorship and $10K in funding to student ventures across a broad variety of industries. Students work toward an August showcase event, where they will present their prospective start-ups to the public. Competition for the program this year was fierce with just twelve teams selected out of nearly one hundred applications. Two of winning teams are co-led by Mechanical Engineering majors.
Dominique Csehill (ENG ’26), leading NextStep EDU, is developing a digital application guidance platform for college admissions, targeting high schools rather than individual students. The team aims to address inequities in the college application process, noting that the high cost of private college consultants, which can range from $4,000 to $15,000, means they are predominantly used by high-income families. NextStep EDU provides guidance, management tools, and informational resources to both students and counselors, offering schools a cost-effective way to reduce counselor workload.
Csehill is now working with local high schools providing free work and resources as part of their pilot test, hoping to see their product have a drastic impact on college admissions and scholarship rates for students at those schools. They are also reaching out to high school counselors around the U.S. to refine their product and add features that help both the students and the counselors. Csehill says,
I’m really looking forward to helping students feel less lost in the process and especially looking forward to starting a scholarship program!
The second venture, Orobor, founded by Jakob Esterowitz (ENG ’27) and Jonah Dickson (COM’25) BU tennis doubles partners, collects discarded tennis strings and transforms them into polyester yarn for textile manufacturing. The team aims to prevent microplastic pollution and reduce CO2 emissions from polyester production by 50%. They have established a collection network with tennis clubs, universities, and tournaments across Massachusetts, where participants can send used strings in repurposed cardboard boxes.
As Division I tennis players at Boston University, they have spent years contributing to the problem of string waste without even realizing it. “This venture is something really personal to us” says Esterowitz. Now, they are turning that experience into a solution by recycling used polyester tennis strings into high-performance fabric. Their process reduces CO₂ emissions by 69%, water use by 95%, and energy consumption by 60% compared to virgin polyester: all while preventing trillions of microplastic particles from entering the environment.
They are currently starting in the tennis space but hoping to eventually expand into full textile-to-textile circularity.
Esterowtiz adds
I’m looking forward to using the BU Summer Accelerator to scale our R&D, deepen our partnerships with Massachusetts-based manufacturers, and gear up for a broader launch. It’s also a chance to keep building right here in Boston, which we care deeply about.
We wish these students the best of luck with their start-ups!