My goal as an entrepreneur has always been to provide a service to my community. Very seldom, I believe, are my ideas for an entrepreneurial venture based upon my want benefits, rather they are centered around what others can gain form it.

 

My first entrepreneurial idea was to create a drafting and design firm for engineering, architecture and design. While the firm will operate by selling designs to larger companies for new devices and technologies, its purpose would be to provide inner- city people and minorities with an opportunity to explore the world of design and sell their ideas in a way that they may not have access to otherwise. This idea was inspired by seeing how few people of color have become prominent in the world of engineering and design. There is a large disconnect between minorities and high paying jobs or just large opportunities. This is not to say that minorities are not represented in fields such as engineering, but it is to say that we need more. I sought to try to fill the space between the amount of interested or talented minority community members and successful minority members in fields like engineering.

 

However, now, I have identified goals that are more pressing for me, considering the time. While I am still interested in the firm idea, my experiences since have lead me down a different direct path for involvement. My immediate goal for entrepreneurship is to open a community barbershop on Cornell University’s campus. I began cutting my hair during my freshman year, and I began trying to cut other students hair during the second semester of my freshmen year. In my sophomore year, first semester, I began to get a lot of students asking about haircuts. By the second semester of my Sophomore year I was cutting hair almost every other day in Sheldon Court in Collegetown where I stayed. It was at this time that I realized a void that students had to work around on campus. Students sought great prices and trustworthy barbers, but the available barbershops were too far, too expensive, too crowded, or didn’t produce good haircuts. I was aware of other barbers on Cornell’s campus and began to create a plan to have a barbershop at Cornell ran by students and owned by students. This is still goal that I am seeking to accomplish before I graduate.

 

Lastly, my main goal for entrepreneurship I only realized the first semester of my junior year. As I was on YouTube watching videos on poverty, I came pass a video on Detroit. The video was a first-person video in which the audience was being taken around the city of Detroit, and we were exposed to the lack of resources available to the community. The video connected with me becasue not only do I have family in Detroit, but I come from the South Side of Chicago, where we experience a similar issue. After watching the video, I decided that I would like to dedicate a large amount of my time educating impoverished communities on communal financial sustainability, meaning ways in which community’s filter money throughout the community for their own benefits. This plan is something I have not been able to develop for long, but it is a plan that I think about often in everything I do.

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SMART GOALS

S- I want to secure a job or internship opportunity that will progress me towards my goal of getting involved with community engagement.

M- I need to make sure that in what I am doing there is an intention to impact communities in a positive and sustainable way.

A- I have to arrange meetings with people that have connections and capitalize on the Cornell connections I have to find opportunities.

R- I am responsible for ensuring that I develop connections and  have a backup plan in case entrepreneurship has a rough start.

T- By the 28th of February I want to have met with my mentor on campus about recommended opportunities and applied to them.

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At the beginning of the semester, I selected a SMART Intention that I would seek to complete. The goal was to secure a job or internship opportunity that will progress me towards my goal of getting involved with community engagement. I measured this goal by being able to say that I have impacted a community in a positive and sustainable way. My responsibility to get the opportunity was to arrange meetings with people that have connections to community engagement and capitalize on the Cornell network that I have access to. The influence to focus on this intention was to prepare myself in case starting off with entrepreneurship was rough and I needed a backup plan. I set a date of meeting with my mentors and applying to opportunities by the 28th of February.

 

As I evaluate my work on my SMART Intention, I recognize, first, that my intention was not completed in the way in which I envisioned it. Unexpectedly, this semester has been very busy and big for me. This semester, I accomplished many things concerning my organizations on campus and myself. Still, I accomplished many things as it concerned my college career and future contributions. For one, although I was not able to meet with one of my mentors to identify opportunities to work, I was able to meet with a mentor through the Pillsbury Institute, Barbara Lang. She helped me to organize a path to me accomplishing my goals and also extended a helping hand to assist me in making connections with entrepreneurs doing similar work. Additionally, while I will not be doing direct community engagement work, I will continue to do work with the Cornell Community over the summer, which I still believe will provide a lot of value. So, while I was not able to complete my SMART Intention as intended, I believe I have still made progress.

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