Starting out small
This Dec. 15, some USU students will graduate in a new major for the university as of this fall: entrepreneurship. According to Department Head Gaylen Chandler, they will move on to take advantage of business opportunities and hopefully begin their own companies someday.
“I’m obviously an advocate of this major,” Chandler said. “In terms of employability and potential for the future, people who can recognize opportunities will have a lot of doors open for them. They will not be dependent on the whims of someone else.”
Entrepreneurs are people who start businesses, said Kevin Liu, who will be graduating in the program next May. They look for niches in a specific market and if there’s opportunity, they take it, he said.
Students who study entrepreneurship learn how to generate new ideas and look for ways to network, create
and manage. Emily Willis, a senior in entrepreneurship said in classes they look at small businesses, how they fail, succeed and what obstacles they face and how to overcome them.
“In a lot of business classes, you look at big corporations like GM,” Willis said. “In the entrepreneur classes, we look at more cases about small, start-up companies like Justin Hamilton and how he started Hamilton’s restaurant. Everything we do is on a smaller scale.”
Chandler said most entrepreneur graduates won’t go on to work for Fortune 500 companies, but will work on with smaller businesses and hopefully create their own after getting experience and finding something that has potential to succeed.
Willis will be among the graduates this December and said she hopes to find a job in retail or management and eventually start her own business, although she’s not sure yet what kind. For now, she hopes to take advantage on the growing possibilities that her major has made achievable for her.
She said several companies will hire entrepreneur graduates to help with research and development and help them see where they could improve.
“Entrepreneurship is the creative side of business,” she said. “We could help them see what opportunities they have or put a twist on a product that they’ve already developed.”
Chandler said the major allows students to go wherever they want it to and the possibilities are endless.
“Entrepreneurship is the American dream and allows people to do better than they would do otherwise,” he said.
Chandler said the major is taking off across the country and other business majors are starting to apply a lot of the entrepreneurship principles into their courses. Eventually, USU would like to have a minor in the program so students in engineering and the sciences could obtain those skills and take them to market, he said.
The skills learned in the major can be applied to real life, Willis said, which makes it a good choice for students who want to study something they can apply right away when they earn their degrees.
Willis has already been able to use some of the principles she learned in her classes by helping her friend start a business, called “It’s a Bead Thing.” She said she isn’t really into beads and making jewelry, but offered to help with advertising and keeping track of revenues, finances and expenses. She helped hold parties where people could come, buy beads and make earrings, bracelets and necklaces.
Like Willis, Liu said the entrepreneurship major helps students learn to be hands-on, which is his favorite part of his classes. He said students learn to make business plans, pitches and are involved in a lot of group work.
The one thing Liu hopes to see improved is knowledge about the major.
“The hardest part is that it’s new,” he said. “Everything isn’t quite set in stone and we don’t know what to do with it. The major has a lot of room to grow. We hope to push it and expand.”
-mnewbold@cc.usu.edu