We’re in an interesting era for entrepreneurship. With the mass adoption of technology that lowers the hurdles for starting businesses, it is easier and cheaper to start a business than ever before. It is not easier, though (and despite what may be projected on social media), to be successful. Students pursue entrepreneurship studies in college for precisely this reason. Those interested in entrepreneurship tend to be dreaming big. They don’t want to start a small business — they want to build an empire.
This can mean navigating the minutia of business, but also the big stuff, like raising Venture Capital and putting together a cap table. And, while you can approximate learning that stuff through overconfident podcasters, the real place to begin to master what it takes build the kind of career as an entrepreneur you want is in a structured learning environment. Namely, college.
We support top students in attaining admission to exceptional colleges for future entrepreneurs, like Wharton, MIT, NYU, and UT Austin, and in this post, we’ll give you a peek into our playbook for supporting students as they proceed towards working on their college applications. We start with our students as early as they are ready, often in the first year or two of their high school careers. While this may sound early, it’s actually super impactful to be a guiding force as students refine their interests and develop their passions.
But you are a junior, so what is your best plan of action? Well, it’s the same game. You need to be refining your interests and developing your passions around entrepreneurship to strengthen your applications. In this post, we’ll break down exactly how you need to be going about that as a junior to achieve the most impressive outcomes come senior year.
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You’ve been in high school for at least two years, and may even be well into your junior year. You are driven, accomplished, and likely have been doing a lot. But now you’re nearing application season, and it is your time to really put the pedal to the floor and do the work that makes a massive difference. Below, we break down exactly what you need to be doing for your activities to truly make a difference.
CLUB LEADERSHIP
The first step is close to ‘home’, and by home we mean your school. You’ve probably been involved with a business or entrepreneurship club at school already, and if you have that is awesome. Now it is time to take the next step towards leadership. Schedule a meeting with the current club heads to ask them how you can best support them in their goals. This will help position you to step into their shoes as a senior. You should also meet with the faculty advisor and make it clear that becoming a head is a goal of yours.
If there is no business or entrepreneurship club at your school, now is the moment to start one. Seriously, now. You are a junior, you have leadership credentials, and you have almost certainly cultivated strong relationships with your teachers. Recruit an initial cohort of club members, secure a faculty advisor, and start planning one or two key activities that you can see through by the end of senior year. For example, this could be a series of business speakers sourced through the high school alumni network, a business simulation immersion, or a pitch competition judged by local business leaders.
But if there is a business or entrepreneurship club at your school and you are not in it, now is not the time to join. Joining as a junior won’t tell a strong story on your application, especially as it won’t set you up for leadership senior year. Instead, focus your attention on the other things on this list.
INTERNSHIP
As a prospective entrepreneurship student, you absolutely must complete an internship before you press submit on your applications senior year. This isn’t required by the colleges you are applying to, but we encourage students to treat it like it is.
Your best internship as a student interested in business and entrepreneurship is with a small, local business, and close to leadership. We want to see you in the meetings where decisions are being made — no, you won’t have a voice, but you will learn a lot. If you intern with a big name company that may sound impressive on its face, but it’s typically quite shallow. They have tons of interns doing lots of busy work, and so you most likely won’t actually have a lot of stories to tell from your experience. Compare this to a small company that needs your help. There, you’d be learning in the trenches of businesses, and that makes for some amazing stories.
INDEPENDENT ENTREPRENEURSHIP
When advising students younger than junior year, we don’t emphasize (or even, often, encourage) students to put a ton of energy into starting their own entrepreneurial endeavors. This doesn’t mean that they can’t start a business, and it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be successful, but it’s much more important — and more likely to strengthen your applications — to put your time and attention into your grades and more structured activities.
But now you are a junior, and you want to be taking big swings. So, let’s bring it. You want to start a small business that generates some amount of revenue, but the point isn’t actually making money. Often students think that saying that they’ve made X amount of dollars will help them get into college. Notice: it won’t. What gets you into college, outside of your academics, are the stories you tell. For this, the most important thing is making stories. Focus on working with other people, building relationships, and providing a meaningful product or service. For example, this could be a craft or cottage industry food business that you sell at local farmer’s markets, it could be a service like lawn maintenance that you market to neighbors, or it could be a babysitting network. Notice that these are all low-tech and high-touch. You are off your phone and working with people. That is key.
RESEARCH & WRITING
Finally, we want to see you engaging with entrepreneurship in a more zoomed out way. Pick a sector, subject, vertical, or company to focus on, and go deep. This is a research project, but through a journalistic perspective. You need to have a research question guiding your exploration, and then dig in.
As you are researching, don’t stick to web searches for sources. Respectfully request phone, email, or in-person interviews with business leaders, journalists, and academics to learn as much as you can about your research question. But to what end?
The ultimate goal here is publication. You want to be able to turn your research into an article or editorial that will be published by your school paper, or another publication open to high school students. We regularly help our students navigate this process, but the first step you take should be to meet with the student or faculty leaders of your school paper to see how you can fit your research into their editorial plans.
Throughout this project, you need to be exploring, researching, and then re-interpreting, taking what you learn and crafting it into a narrative that is both compelling and educational for readers.
As an entrepreneurship-minded student, you are a driven self-starter. Now is the time to harness that energy and turn it into actions with outcomes. Let’s make it happen.
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