3A-My Entrepreneurship Story!

       My story begins at the end of my freshman year at UF (the spring of 2016). I had gone to my advisor to discuss my classes for the upcoming year. I am a biology major, hoping to become a dentist one day. I had spent the year taking difficult science classes and wondering how the next three years of my college experience were going to be. When I pictured them, I imagined spending all of my time in labs and libraries. However, when I saw my advisor I found the entrepreneurship minor. I found it interesting and a good break from the science world so I decided to enroll in my first class, ENT3503. This class was my first taste of the Entrepreneurship world.
      I truly had no idea what to expect with that course. To be honest, I did not even know what social entrepreneurship was. As I began to watch the lectures and complete the assignments for this class, I became intrigued. We got to analyze our carbon footprints as well as the environmental impacts of large corporations. I got to research BMW and learned how they are actually more ecologically friendly in their business and productions ventures than I thought. I learned about individual entrepreneurs and the impacts that they have had on our society. So many of them started as normal college students just like us and now they have changed the world for the better! My favorite part of this course though was our Experiential Learning Consulting Project. This was a project in which we were paired up with three other students and assigned a social entrepreneur venture here in Gainesville. I got to work with the Field and Fork pantry which is located right on campus! Throughout this project we got to work together as individual entrepreneurs and think of ideas on how to better our venture. This included areas from writing a business plan to thinking of ways to expand our venture to a wider audience to creating a plan of what we would spend on these activities. This is when I finally understood what it meant to be an entrepreneur. You have your own ideas that you have to put your passion into and you get to watch them grow and unfold. The success is all in your own hands and that is something that excites me! I like to be in control of things and I like having a part in making my dreams a reality. ENT3503 taught me tools that entrepreneurs use daily and how their actions affect our world.

       I enrolled in this class first and foremost because it was required for my minor. However, I would never have thought to taken this course without finding the minor, but am so glad I did. After taking ENT3503, I am excited to learn even more about the field of Entrepreneurship. Since ENT3503 was focused more on social entrepreneurs, I feel very well versed in that topic. However, we briefly touched on the fact that social entrepreneurship is only one branch of a large domain. I am interested in seeing what other sectors of the business world entrepreneurs work in. I want to learn techniques on how to better develop my own ideas and how to put them into action. I hope to learn how to connect my assignments done in this class to my future. I hope to own and run my own dental practice one day and know that I could apply some of my entrepreneurial techniques into that. So as I take this course, I will keep that in the back of my mind.