In Bey Hall Room 127, home to Monmouth University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, Alison Gilbert works. Gilbert has spent the past four years collaborating with students and entrepreneurs to turn early ideas into something real, leading the Center’s work on campus and throughout the region. The path that brought Gilbert to Room 127, though, was not one she could have mapped out in advance.
Originally from Monmouth County, she decided to follow her passion for cooking after graduating from college in D.C. and realizing that law school wasn’t the route for her. Gilbert began working at a local bakery in Ocean Grove, eventually becoming head baker. She later moved to New York with plans to one day open a bakery of her own. There, she trained as a pastry chef at the French Culinary Institute and gained experience in professional kitchens.
In what she described as a “serendipitous, right-place, right-time moment,” Gilbert met with the CEO of a food media start-up through a friend, and he created a part-time position for her. About a month in, she believed in the media company so much that she quit her kitchen job and accepted a full-time role.
Within her first year, Gilbert became COO and went on to help scale the startup into a 40-person, multimillion-dollar business, reaching millions of readers. She went on to do the same for a digital wellness publication, helping them get from their first two-person co-founder team to their first 15 employees and first $1 million in revenue. “I was really excited, and I felt like I did well at getting something from zero to 60,” said Gilbert.
The experience helped Gilbert recognize something that would become a through line in her work: she loved helping ambitious ideas, and the people behind them, grow. Over the next decade, she brought that experience to hundreds of early-stage entrepreneurs, working with founders to develop their ideas, navigate decisions, and build toward growth.
“When you look back, you realize that every experience gives you something you carry forward,” Gilbert said. “My path may not look linear on paper, but there’s a clear thread through all of it. I’ve always been drawn to creating, to taking an idea, figuring out what it needs, finding and bringing the pieces together and turning it into something real. Today, I get to help other people do that with ideas of their own.”
At Monmouth, that work has grown in impact. Through venture development, mentorship, workshops and community programs, the Center has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs at different stages, from people exploring their first idea to founders actively building and scaling. Gilbert’s approach brings together creativity and business building, with as much emphasis on developing the person behind the venture as the venture itself. The goal is to guide entrepreneurs toward becoming confident, resourceful builders who can take an idea and keep moving it forward.
Alexandria Young ’26 is one example. Young first came to the Center as a freshman with an idea for a body care product before pivoting to Dialeco, a virtual language-immersion platform inspired by her own desire to connect with her family. With support from the Center, she went on to become a HawkTank finalist, participate in the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program and join a New York City accelerator. Now a Monmouth graduate, Young is teaching herself to code and building Dialeco’s prototype.
“As I was going through the Center for Entrepreneurship E-Lab I noticed that I couldn’t figure out what problem I was truly solving with my original idea for the skincare product. I personally connect to my business now and was truly motivated to understand Spanish because my mom is from Panama. For me, learning this language helped connect me to my family. I recognized a gap with other apps where it was easy to memorize words or phrases but I wasn’t given the tools to speak it dynamically. Dialeco teaches you the different dialects of a language while also guiding you to fluency,” Young explained.
For Gilbert, Young’s progression captures what it means to help the builder build. The idea evolved, but so did the entrepreneur behind it. Young learned to test, pivot, seek out resources and develop entirely new skills to keep moving her venture forward.
Across the Center, stories like Young’s take different forms. Entrepreneurs move from early ideas to prototypes, pitch competitions, accelerators and products in the market, developing the skills, confidence and resourcefulness to turn ideas into impact. For Gilbert, perhaps that is the thread that has connected her every step of the way: helping people believe in an idea, figuring out its ingredients, and bringing it to life.
