What if you could spend your life doing something you love, getting paid for it and doing it as close to how you want to while still making money? That’d be a pretty great gig, and it’s not too far from reality. Entrepreneurship has a number of fulfilling and practical benefits that can make your dream come true as long as you have the passion to make it into a business.
One of the biggest draws to entrepreneurship is the ability to pursue your dream. That may sound cheesy, but in 2012 there were 805,985 small businesses in North Carolina; that’s at least 805,985 passions realized.
And it’s not just North Carolina that’s beneficial, it’s our university too.
NC State has the resources for entrepreneurship. Just on campus we have two Makerspaces (one at D.H. Hill Library and one at Hunt Library) for you to create unique products using resources ranging from sewing and embroidery machines to help you create products by hand, to Raspberry Pi and Arduino circuit boards to help you craft electronic creations, to 3D printing and scanning to bring ideas into physical form.
The university also has an entrepreneur clinic and an eGarage available to students. Students can use the clinic to observe other entrepreneurs, helping inspire and create high quality entrepreneurs. The eGarage is a physical space reserved for students to lay out prototypes of their products and talk to other members of the garage, all you have to do is fill out an application and take a short introduction.
Lastly, NC State actively encourages that these resources be used to their full potential with the Lulu eGames (which are starting up this month) and Entrepalooza. The eGames are a start-up competition here at State with over $100k in prizes. Entrepalooza is an innovation festival known for its “Minute to Pitch it” event which gives students a minute to pitch their idea to an audience, with the winner receiving a prize. These events give those with limited resources financially a way to get past those limitations.
The resources at NC State, combined with the dreams of students has been an effective combination too. Startups like Cree (LED company), Xanofi (nanofiber company), Agile Sciences (biopharmaceutical company) and WebAssign can trace roots to NC State. Over 100 startups can trace their beginnings to NC State; the university keeps a list. NC State also keeps statistics on those start-ups, with a combined economic impact of $1.2 billion on NC. NC State is all for entrepreneurship; if you think your university is holding you back from achieving your dreams, it’s not.
But if you’re still not convinced, there are plenty of practical advantages to entrepreneurship you should know about too.
For starters, you get more flexibility in your hours and your location as an entrepreneur. Nothing can tell you that you can’t take the day off or go on a vacation except for your budget.
Beyond the flexibility provided by entrepreneurship, it has some benefits to college students particularly. Almost every job application has a section for experience and education, and companies of course take these qualities into consideration when choosing an employee.
Often times experience and education measurements fail to capture true potential and ability to work. Plenty of successful individuals lack a college education. Take Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as some of the more well-known examples: college dropouts who conquered industries. When you’re an entrepreneur, education means less and your actual ability means more.
Another of the largest practical benefits is the control over your fate given to you by entrepreneurship. If you want to earn more, you work more. Compare that to a regular job, where you would have to put in an extreme amount of work to get a raise or a promotion, and your great work benefits your boss before it ever gets to you.
Beyond money, though, is a control over your own worth. Consider the following scenario: you graduate and spend a few years in some industry. Then comes along a new technology and your field is obsolete. You get laid off because your company wants to keep with the times and you can’t get a job for the same reason. This isn’t unlikely either; a study by PwC estimates that as many as 38 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated by 2030. But, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re not the one getting laid off when the world changes, you’re the one changing the way your company works, and the one who lays people off if need be.
Risk is a currency and taking a risk is like spending money: do it too often and you likely won’t be able to keep it up, but just like never spending money, never taking a risk means never getting what you dream of.
Often times we get stuck in a pattern, working just to pay rent and going to class so that we can get a better job. Maybe you’re OK with that, maybe you just want to get by, that’s respectable. But a large amount of students, especially at NC State, have been proven to have the desire and the ability to take the leap. Why not you?
