My Entrepreneurship Story

Hey everyone,

     Before the first day of this class I really only associated starting a new business or inventing a new product forms of entrepreneurship; so needless to say, the following story wasn’t an intentional attempt at using entrepreneurship.

     In my high school there was a festival that took place every year for all the foreign languages in the county to come together and represent their language in different forms. I participated every year because if you got first place you would get extra credit in your foreign language class, which I needed because Spanish wasn’t my strong suit. Due to my lack of grasping the language, each year I entered the craft category where it wasn’t required to speak a word of the language. The only problem with this category is that a lot of people entered and many of them were excellent painters or drawers, unlike myself who can draw an average stick figure only. Because I really needed the extra credit I was forced to come up with something that the judges hadn’t seen before so that I could blow their minds. 

     My approach for each project was to go with something that showed it took time and commitment. For my junior year I made a “painting” of Pablo Neruda, a famous Spanish poet, where instead of using paint to color in the photo I wrote his poems in different black pens. While not a new concept, it was something that the judges hadn’t seen before and it really increased the competition the following year. Senior year I used the same approach of doing something different and created a photo of Frida Kahlo, a famous Spanish painter, completely out of pushpins.

Pablo Neruda

Frida Kahlo

     In both of these instances I identified an opportunity to change the way people were creating crafts each year and developed a successful strategy to make my crafts unique and memorable.

     As a general business major I was open to taking business electives in different categories, i.e. economics or finance, because I didn’t really have a preference. I chose ENT3003 because I’ve looked into an entrepreneurship minor in the past and I really wanted to get a feel for what the minor would be like. Initially my main driving factor for taking this class was to turn the business electives that I had to take into an entrepreneurship minor so that I would get something useful out of the electives; however, as I began to learn that entrepreneurship is a mindset and therefore doesn’t have to only be applied to the business world, I have begun to see more uses for it. As mentioned in a previous post, I want to become an obstetrician and I now believe that that having an entrepreneurship mindset could be a great advantage in the medical world.

     Entrepreneurship teaches you how to identify opportunity and how to develop a solution; overall I think entrepreneurship teaches you how to think outside the box, which is an invaluable skill in the medical world. The medical field is far from cookie cutter, the unpredictable will happen and I think it’s important to be able to identify a problem as well as assess risk and opportunity. What I really hope to get out of this class is a strong appreciation for entrepreneurship in addition to a basis of understanding of the mindset that I can build upon in later classes as I complete the minor.