James Gilmore
So you want to be a rock star?
The first time James Gilmore visited the Foster Student Innovation Center, the staff there asked him a single question: What do you want to do with your life?
His answer?
“I want to be a rock star.”
“They told me, this is what you have to do; these are the steps you have to take,” Gilmore, a sophomore business major from Eliot, Maine, recalled. “Other people might’ve said, ‘rock star is a bit far-fetched,’ but at Foster, they take anything and help you out with it.”
Gilmore, who was a freshman at the time of that initial meeting, didn’t know much about the innovation center, but he’s always had an entrepreneurial streak. And music is his life. He wanted to create a compilation CD of campus bands, and the center helped him make the connections necessary to make it a success — everyone from the owner of a local recording studio to a copyright lawyer.
The resulting CD, Campus Bands 2009, is now available through iTunes, at the UMaine Bookstore and Bull Moose Music. And Gilmore has more ideas in the works.
“If I ever need somebody to advise me on business plans, I know where to turn,” Gilmore says. “The people at Foster have always been a big help, even if I just want to bounce ideas off them.”
