People who love business tend to know it early. They are the kind of young people who take every opportunity to run a lemonade stand, make money doing yard work for neighbors, or even start their own small business. As a high school sophomore looking to study business in college, you may have already done some — or even all — of this. And if you have business cards, a LinkedIn, or a personal website with a digital resume, that wouldn’t surprise us.
It's easier to start a business, though, than it is to get into a top-tier undergraduate business program. To compete for a spot at a prestigious school, you will need to have top grades, especially in math, strong scores, and an enviable list of activities and extracurricular pursuits. We work with students as early as freshman year to begin building towards an exceptional application, and sophomore year is a perfect time to truly dig in and do the things that will make a difference when you are writing your essays and supplements. If that sounds a long way away, it is actually going to come up super quickly. So, let’s start now.
In this post, we are going to give you a look behind the curtain to see how we work with our sophomores to craft an exciting and fun slate of activities that is personally transformative and helpful when it comes time to apply to college.
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Many students interested in business start and end their activities with a, well, business. They figure that if you want to study business, and you want to build a business in the future, you may as well start now. So, they start a business and let it take over their whole life outside of school and cross their fingers that colleges will love it.
This all sounds pretty grand, but it’s actually a terrible approach from an admissions perspective. You will need to show colleges more than your ability to build a website and register as an LLC, even if your company is financially successful. They want to see collaboration, leadership, the ability to worth within an organization that you aren’t in charge of, and, above all, an intellectual and academic approach to business. Below, we break down what you need to be doing to show these characteristics of yourself and dig into how best to tackle each one.
BUSINESS CLUB
First, you want to join a business club at school. Ideally, you will lead the club junior or senior year, but before that we want to see you taking on opportunities for leadership and service within the club structure. For example, you could lead a program orienting new members or tackle a project that benefits your school community. You should also meet with the student heads of the club to ask them how you can best support them in accomplishing their goals. This will position you to become a strong underclassmen leader in line for further responsibility in the future.
If your school does not have a business club, today is the day that you begin starting one! Recruit some friends and a faculty advisor, and speak with your school about the protocol for creating a new club. This is a fabulous way to create something of value for your community that will have impacts far beyond your high school career.
Online Courses
Most schools don’t offer finance, accounting, marketing, or entrepreneurship courses. We like to have our students take a few business courses at a time to supplement all their other activities. Check out Coursera, edX, or Yale Open Courses. By taking additional courses, you’ll be able to hone a niche within the larger category of “business.”
INTERNSHIP
As a student interested in business, the next most important thing that you need to be working towards is an internship. Ideally, you would do more than one internship before graduation. In order to pull this off timing-wise, you need to start early, and sophomore year is the perfect.
As a sophomore, there is a lot of competition from older students for internships, so you may need to get creative to find one in a role that also resonates with your business interests. We work with our students to identify opportunities in your network (friends, friends of friends, family friends, family, etc.) that you can leverage into introductions and, eventually, that can help crack open doors.
Remember, most companies don’t advertise that they accept interns. So, if you can’t find an “internships” page on a company website, don’t flinch. It’s always worth starting a conversation and seeing what is possible. Don’t rule a company out, either, if they aren’t tech savvy or don’t have a robust web presence — that may be something you can help with. Working with a multi-generational small local business has the potential to teach you things that are foundational to building a business that lasts. Also don’t rule out a business that isn’t exactly what you want to go into someday, but wherever you intern should be connected to an aspect of business that you love, whether it’s a type of product or service, or a business structure.
RESEARCH
Okay, so if you want to study business in college you may not immediately think of “research” as something you need to be spending time doing as a sophomore. However, we’ve found that engaging in scholarship around business is a major plus on any college application with a business degree in mind. So, where do you start?
We love to point students towards this mega (albeit not exhaustive) list of 70 places to publish work by high school students. There are many on this list specifically focused on research by high schoolers, and knowing where you want your work to end up will help you in refining what it is, specifically, that you want to be doing. For example, you could research the rise of Multi-Level Marketing, explore the first tech bubble, or examine a specific company as a case study of a type. The goal is for this project to challenge you to think about business analytically, to build your business vocabulary, and to result in a tangible outcome: publication or presentation.
SUMMER JOB
Finally, you need to get hired. Find a part-time summer job that is customer facing and at the very bottom of the ladder of whatever local company you like that hires high school kids seasonally. This may be scooping ice cream, life guarding at a pool, working as a counselor for a town day camp, running a shaved ice operation, or lugging bags of mulch for a landscaping company (these are all jobs, for the record, that students of ours have done). This job will not, and should not, be impressive except in how impressively you tackle, master, and build on from it. The point is to learn the lessons at the bottom of the ladder, develop team management skills, and learn more about the day-to-day of turning an idea into a real business. Having the role be customer-facing is thus imperative. You must be working alongside and in service of human people.
But should you start a business?
If you are thinking that you have a big business idea and all this sounds pretty fine and dandy but also like it will get in the way of your dreams, we’re sorry you feel that way. Over a decade we’ve guided students towards their dream schools, and very, very rarely does a student-started initiative make the sort of impact for applications that the student came into the process thinking it would. The truth is, college is one big community, so they want to see you acting as a member of a community now — not at a lone wolf with an app-based dream.
So, if you are intent on starting a company get a job first. Join a club first. Building a business, even an impressive one, will not take the place of being part of a team.
We support students through the college application process, from sophomore year to dream school. Learn more.