A well-deserved award caught up with Costa Zafiris last week, validation for his dogged pursuit of the entrepreneurial dream.

Zafiris, 24, graduated from Dalhousie University in May with a commerce degree and a major in entrepreneurship.

During his time at Dal, he was a common sight at the various startup initiatives and he is a founder of three budding startups — Date Caddie, Unify and PlayPeanut.

Last week, he learned that when he graduated he’d won the Commerce Alumni Association Award in Entrepreneurship for the highest academic standing in his major. For some reason, it was overlooked at the commencement ceremony. Zafiris received the news with surprise and customary modesty.

“My grades are good but I don’t think they’re over the top,” he said in an interview this week.

Without knowing the grades of Zafiris or his classmates, I can say it’s great to see recognition for one of the foot soldiers of the startup movement in universities. He’s making a living by working as an education facilitator at the Centre for Entrepreneurship Education and Development in Halifax.

On evenings and weekends, he works on these three projects in the hopes one will make money.

“I still don’t consider myself an entrepreneur,” he said, saying his ventures would need to be making money for him to feel he had made the grade.

“What I have to do is to keep pushing the projects forward. If one would take off and I could do it full time, that would be the goal. I’m not there yet.”

I first met Zafiris and his collaborator Callum Mayer when they took their company PlayPeanut through the Starting Lean program at Dal. (Disclosure: Dalhousie is a client of Entrevestor.) PlayPeanut is a social gaming platform for sports fanatics, and it allows them to bet — not for money but for the fun of it — on sports events.

They’re still developing the product and looking for creative ways to fund the project.

They proved really good at learning about their clients’ needs and tailoring their business to meet them. Their hard work was always balanced with a cheerful enthusiasm, never taking themselves too seriously. The corporate name for PlayPeanut is Fun Intended Inc.

They started to work on other ideas like Unify, which tells university alumni about innovations taking place at their alma mater. The idea is that once graduates know about the innovation, they’ll want to support the teams of young innovators.

Mayer and Zafiris just took Unify through the Launchpad accelerator at Dal and are now looking for about three universities to adopt the platform for the coming school year.

The project that has attracted the most attention in the media is Date Caddie, an online app that helps people plan imaginative dates.

It’s growing in popularity and Zafiris and co-founder Chris Johnson are now pondering how to generate revenue from it.

Zafiris and his partners are pushing these projects forward and he hopes one will take off. Or maybe another project will work out and he can finally call himself an entrepreneur.

“You might try nine projects before one is a success,” he said. “So I’m just trying to get a lot of experience under my belt while I’m still young.”