Dust It Off

A few years went by where my idea laid on my shelf collecting dust. I mentioned it to people as the occasions permitted. The feedback I got was mostly that it was a good idea, but didn’t really have any interest. After all who, really cares about throwing away a measly marker.

It wasn’t until late in 2016 that I was sitting in another class later in my academic career, that another professor said something that sparked a little bit of action in me. At this point in time, I had moved on to engineering school and we had this weekly class called seminar. We would gather for a couple of hours and discuss various broad topics and we happened to talk about career prep in the field of engineering. I remember going around from person to person seeing what everyone’s plans were and getting to me. Instead of giving some job, I just said, what does this class do for someone that doesn’t really want to work for someone else. Where is the value in this exercise for me? The person teaching the class didn’t really know how to respond to this and went on like nothing happened.

Strangely enough, about a month or so later, all of the students in my program got an email that the program was going to host their first ever entrepreneurial try out. As soon as I read this email, I remembered the comment that I had made and knew this was to me, a much welcomed response to my candid nature. Anyone whom wanted to could pitch a project idea, and whomever pitched the best idea was granted some cash and a team devoted to working on their idea for an entire semester. I knew which idea I was going with, and this was the opportunity that offered me something I could in no other way afford, that thing was help from others.