BACKGROUND
Hometown: Cleveland, Ohio
HS Education: St. Edward High School
Current Status: Undergraduate and ICE Scholar
Planned Major: Business Finance
Possible Minors: Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Data and Analytics
CURRENT ASPIRATIONS
The field of entrepreneurship is filled to the brim with people who are obsessed with one single burning passion: making money in the shortest amount of time and cashing out. This simple fact became apparent to me after involvement in some entrepreneurial projects in high school where I met successful business men who evaluated my ovulated net worth of a person at first glance.
I aspire to be a type of successful that’s not defined the number of zeroes in my checking account but instead defined by the amount of good I do in the world. How I will do that remains a question I have yet to answer. Until the right opportunity presents itself, the project starts with being successful as a student and networking to find people with similar aspirations and to grow from there.
ME AS A LEARNER
Some unique interests I have are a love of being out in nature, exploring the art based communities, and playing the cello. The most meaningful experience I had in high school was spending the last three years volunteering as a camp counselor for an MDA camp one week during the summer. There I learned to be responsible for another person and built meaningful relationships that continue to grow every year.
For me, like everybody, high school was filled with points of major success and major failure. I acted as editor in chief for my high school newspaper, The Edsman, where I did everything from facilitating meetings to digital layout to editing articles. However, for the better part of my junior and senior year, I worked on forming a non-profit through an entrepreneurship program set up at our school. This project, called Lend to Grow, was supposed to connect people to small business owners in third world countries and give them an opportunity to invest small amounts in these people. After the low interest loan was paid back, the initial investor, who could be absolutely anyone, would have the chance to repay the loan. Though I tried to make the project work, the eventual result was shoving a square brick in a circular hole, and by the end of high school I had nothing to show. But from this failure, I learned how to present and convince people of an idea that seemed impractical and lacking in monetary gain (in that it had no $ attached to it). Though I came here with little knowledge in the field I want to enter, the skills I developed in communication and organization have already served me well in this new setting.