Entrepreneurship

My students have been working on an entrepreneur project for the past few months. Basically, they have been working in teams of 4-5 in order to create their own company and products, and sell it to the school community. The students have been reaping nuggets of learning - they have learned how to work better in teams and learned more about entrepreneurship. My ultimate goal was to expand their vision and help them see the benefits of entrepreneurship.

I asked my students to write a reflection about their experience. Below is one of their reflections. I shedded internal tears of joy when I read that "women can be creating their own businesses so they don't have to rely on men anymore and people." #empowerment #education

"Creating your own business is an interesting and complicated experience but there are many benefits to it and it’s definitely worth it. The first benefit is that you get to make your own decisions instead of just following someone’s rules. You win respect of all your employees depending on the kind of boss you are instead of always trying to be respectful to a person of higher authority that’s intimidating. And finally, if your company becomes successful after all the hard work, you become known and powerful. I really liked the experience of creating our company from scratch because we learned and improved so many things that we need in life like team work, responsibility, tolerance and learning how to accept other members’ opinions. We had to come up with an idea that would sell a lot so we could donate one third of the money to charity and I believe we did a good job. The idea of just having a company thrilled me, I wanted people to love our products so I did everything I could to make this company the best one. The things that I didn’t like about this experience are a few, it was a little hard working with my coworkers because we had different opinions and we argued about them, and also sometimes they were lazy and didn’t want to work. Entrepreneurship is a big part of Costa Rica, we make a lot of money by it and it definitely needs to continue growing. This needs to happen because we would be making Costa Rica more known and respected and we would also be giving many people a job. Some entrepreneur opportunities in Costa Rica is that women can be creating their own businesses so they don’t have to rely on men anymore and people can also be expanding different areas like tourism."