My Entrepreneurship Story

Last year I had spent the fall semester in China to learn Chinese and essentially live as one, but I wasn't alone in China as I had family there to support me. One such member is my uncle from another grandmother, and grandfather, who happens to be an entrepreneur and a successful one at that. When he wasn't helping me get accustomed to my new setting for the next few months, we had long conversations on what I should expect in the future and one of which was his life story. My uncle did not have a glamorous childhood like most people in China at that time. He had an alcoholic father who would gamble what little money the family had and the mother struggled to feed her children. The mother soon passed away due to an illness and the father was barely seen around the little apartment they had. My uncle did not want live this way for the rest of his life, and so he decided to work hard for a life that he wanted to live. It started with him working multiple jobs to start living away from his dad. He worked tirelessly to save up money for the future , until opportunity came knocking at his doorstep. A vacant street market on sale would be the stepping stone for his future, and so he took the risk of buying that lot with the money he had saved up. From there he would rent out the space to small businesses such as restaurants, shops, and office. But he didn't stop there, from there he would improve his business by buying books about the market and reading them to learn. He then made his own opportunities rather than wait for them, building new markets, malls, and businesses. He changed his game when the market demanded a new businesses to be made such as pharmacies and hospitals. My uncle is the man he is today because of everything that he had accomplished from that small street market he had bought at the risk that it wouldn't be successful. At the end of his story, my uncle had this to say, "You should stay in China nephew." I kid, but what my uncle's life story is a very important lesson on what business is. Business is a risk in itself, but what you do before and after is an important factor to make a risk into a success.

I joined this class because I was in engineering before, specifically in computer science of engineering. After brutally finding out what I was in for in the class, I decided to explore new options and what I'm hoping to find in this class is an opportunity for me to succeed in and to learn entrepreneurship and its fundamentals.