My Entrepreneurship Story

Hello everyone,

Well today I will be talking about the time where I felt I was most exposed to entrepreneurship. The time was when I took my first trip to California. The city I visited was Menlo Park, California. For those who don't know that is where the Facebook headquarters is located. I took this trip due to a club trip. Before entering the University of Florida I was enrolled at Santa Fe College for a year. I joined a club named Society of Hispanics Professional Engineers (SHPE). I was the club's senator for Student Government. That was the first time I've ever held any type of leadership position. As the year progressed I later rose up in the ranks of the club and at the end of the year elections came up. I was running against another club member for the position for president of the club. When the votes were tallied I WON! This was the first time I ever was basically the leader of something. The summer was coming up. Since I had no leadership skills the past president recommended that I go to a leadership training for the club called NILA. This event was being held in the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. 

Now that I have given you the background information, this is where I experienced  the real entrepreneurship skills.  Everyone in the conference was a leader of their perspective clubs. I was paired with 5 other leaders and our task was to build an app form scratch and present it in 3 days. This conference was an intensive and rigorous training book camp. Every team was basically deprived of sleep because we were required to start the morning classes at 6:30 am and each day we went to sleep at 3:00 am. 

Now lets talk about the app building experience. The others engineers were either mechanical, industrial, or non computer related. I was the only Computer Science major. I realized this so I took the initiative to take charge of the programming aspect of the app building process. I had little to no programming experience but I still decided to take the risk. The task was difficult I had three days to finish an app. Luckily I had the help of online resources that helped me along the process. It was an intensive and sleep draining process, but the end result was worth it. My team and I had a final presentation and app to showcase. It was a nerve wrecking experience, I was sweating from the nervousness. In the end, I was so relieved. Although my team didn't win it was truly a learning experience.

This event and the year prior to the event was the first exposure to any leadership or entrepreneurship I have had. This experience allowed me to grow as a person. Now I want to take on new and riskier challenges. I will try, if I fail I will pick my self up and keep trying. If I keep failing I will try to fail better until I finally succeed. Let's see what the future has in store for me. I'm optimistic!