3A- Your Entrepreneurship Story

My Story

               I was first exposed to the world of entrepreneurship when I decided to take a course in industrial design at Northwestern University when I was a rising sophomore in high school. I took this course because the description caught my interest when it talked about being hands on, creative, and working with others to create something. In this class, a small class of three boys and three girls (myself included), we were required to think of products to help combat everyday problems in society. At first, we would just sketch our solutions. As the course went on, we started building small prototypes of them. For example, one week, I built a new iPhone stand that would charge your phone and play movies projected onto a large screen. In the middle of the course, we were split into two groups and were tasked with developing a solution to a given problem. Our case was that we had to design a more efficient pizza cutter. In order to do this, my team and I first came up with a huge list of all the current problems pizza cutters have, like not cutting through pizza all the way, having to use another utensil to pick up a slice, taking cheese off other slices of pizza, etc. Then, we went to different local pizza places and interviewed the workers, asking them about the pizza cutters they used. Lastly, we ran our own experiment where we had our peers use a pizza cutter on a real pizza, and we wrote down all the issues they had. We then proceeded to think of all the ways we could reinvent the pizza cutter. After much deliberation and coming up with several prototypes, we finally had narrowed it down to three pizza cutters. We each made a real version of our pizza cutter, made out of stainless steel, and presented our findings at the end of the course.

(Left: a jewelry tree I made in the class. Right: my class, except the girl to the left who was the RA)

           

            This course was the first time I was introduced to product design and the first time I was able to actually build prototypes of my own ideas. I thought it was the coolest thing, and I knew this is what I wanted to do in my future. From that point on, I knew I wanted to run my own business, and create a product that satisfies society's needs and helped then live an easier life. Being an inventor and an entrepreneur can sometimes be separated, but sometimes they are not, and if I am too invent a product, I know for a fact that I would want to run my own business. Without this class, I would have never been exposed to this world and I never would have realized that I want to be an entrepreneur one day. This is why I enrolled in this course. Since I took a course that made me realize this, I believe that taking a course on entrepreneurship will further this passion and also help me in the long run if I am to run my own company one day. I hope to learn about small details involved in being an entrepreneur that many people may not realize. I am also interested in minoring in entrepreneurship, and this course is required for that.