Stevens is changing the way I think about entrepreneurship.
I am still very apprehensive about entrepreneurs and their startup businesses. I just hate the risk involved and the uncertainty moving forward with a startup. I cannot recommend it to anyone, and it is certainly not the path for me.
I am more like someone who wants to sit comfortably in a big business and work my way up a ladder. This path, to me, is more stable and secure, and there are plenty of safety nets in a larger business; subordinate companies, for example, that will assist when one branch is doing poorly.
So, when I heard Stevens was augmenting its freshman programs to promote entrepreneurship, you can probably see why I was very distressed. Why would we sell this to freshmen? They should be honed into tools for the big businesses so they can make tons of money and pay off their student debt! This is, at least, my plan.
Of course, it is really obvious that all big businesses came from entrepeneuring, well skilled people with market smarts who placed themselves in the perfect situation. I didn’t connect the dots at first; that is what Stevens wanted with entrepreneurship. It isn’t small businesses, per se. It is more akin to big business in the making, Stevens wants to create budding big business.
That is an idea I can get behind. At least, I can get behind it more than before.
However, I still don’t think I am the guy for it. How horrifying would it be to start a business and struggle to get noticed, constantly being threatened with the closure of your company due to competition? Too terrible and stressful for me, not to mention the ungodly amount of hours I would have to put in to get anywhere with it, along with endless calls for advertising and the like. No, definitely not for me. But for an ambitious student who honestly thinks they can make it big, I suppose it might work out. For example, if a student from Stevens with market smarts goes to some place where there are few engineering firms and comes up with, let’s say, a survey/geotechnical firm that specializes in footings, and it just so happens, (and it never just happens, this would have been calculated) that the region is looking to develop some buildings, then that entrepreneur could really turn some coin.
I can see why this is a benefit to Stevens as well: any student who gets a degree here and actually does manage to create a company and make it hugely successful might come back to help the school financially. It is no secret that any college or institution relies heavily on its donations. Besides, it looks really good to know that so-and-so CEO was trained at Stevens, the successful are personal advertisements for their alma mater.
That said, statistically, I still don’t think it works out well. The odds of your everyday person going out and making one of the next top 500 ENR companies are very low. However, the way my view is changing, I am starting to realize that a Stevens student isn’t just your everyday person.
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