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.
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| Pablo Neruda |
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| 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.
