How do you measure growth during your semester in college? There doesn't seem to be a quantifiable solution. While I may look the same, I've made great internal shifts and unmeasurable growth.
Towards the end of my junior year of high school, I began to embrace my passion for entrepreneurship. While it may have seemed newfound on the outside, it was something that had been boiling inside me for as long as I can remember. Until this point, my high school trajectory and career path felt pre-determined by external factors. Grandparents urged me to become a doctor, living in Seattle, friends and family praised anyone interested in tech, and seemingly the greatest minds I knew all studied computer science. Entrepreneurship was the dangerous path, a path filled with risk and one that wasn't stable.
I decided to jeer away from the pre-determined path and reflect on what I truly enjoyed, what truly mattered, and reflected on the question of "what is my competitive advantage?". On my robotics team, I switched from the programming team to business and took an entrepreneurship class in my first semester of senior year. That was when I truly knew that this was something worth pursuing, and that the reward was worth the risk. That summer I built out IvyHacks, a college guidance and education business which to my surprise quickly grew a following and began generating revenue. That was my first taste of the excitement that entrepreneurship could bring.
Entering my first semester of college at The University of Southern California (USC) Iovine and Young Academy (IYA), I was finally able to pursue a path that was true to myself. The amount of growth and progress I made academically, emotionally, and entrepreneurially was completely unexpected and heavily influenced by my environment and by the people I chose to surround myself with. The IYA major is a specialized program with 60 students in my cohort, all of whom are talented and passionate about something whether it be graphic design, game development, hardware and we all connected over a shared passion for startups and entrepreneurship. Something that is often overlooked but incredibly truly is that growth is a factor of your environment.
It brought me great joy to finally be around people who were like me. At least in my school, I felt the judgement of creating my own business and I remember vividly even being asked why I was even doing it, it was uncomprehensible for some and seemed ridiculous. Although growth once again can never occur without risk and risk can never occur without change. Initially, even I felt doubts as I climbed cringe mountain. For those who are not familiar, cringe mountain is a concept coined by Erica Mallet that when trying something new with intention to grow, the people who make fun of you are the same people who haven't left the basecamp and who won't ever take the risk. Once you consistently climb cringe mountain and begin to see results, that's when you face less doubt.
When creating content for IvyHacks, it felt incredibly cringe – luckily, I wasn't doing it alone and alongside my cofounder and one of my best friends, Lucy, we were able to continue progress and consistently post. Eventually, the work paid off and no longer did it seem cringe to post videos when they were getting hundreds of thousands of views and garnering traffic to our website and to now allowing us to get paid over $200 per sponsored post for just a few minutes of work. While this idea was originally used to describe the content creation/influencer journey could be applied to almost any step you would have to make towards success and growth.
Now by combining these two ideas that I embraced this semester-freeing myself from cringe and surrounding myself with the right people- I was able to accomplish the most growth in my life. Another substantial impact to my college experience was Sigma Eta Pi (SEP), USC's premier entrepreneurship society and startup incubator. Once again, it was incredible to surround myself with so many people who not only loved what I did but also were more skilled than I was. Every day spent at an SEP meeting felt impactful. Coming from a high school where I had only known one other person to be interested in startup to now being around so many driven, ambitious, and passionate people felt amazing. If you think of it statistically, how many people are into startups? How many of those people are around my age? How many of those people are women? The number grows increasingly small and to finally be in a space with female founders who were around the same age as me allowed me to grow in ways I couldn't even imagine.