NEED SOME extra cash for that weekend bar excursion? How about a 50-50 shot at a few hundred million dollars? Your simple task in return: Think of a word, and then add .com at the end.
There's a new trend hitting college students across the country, rooted in the entrepreneurial spirit that also helped build the 10 cent lemonade stands of our youth. It is e-commerce, or in layman's terms, the Internet business. It can even begin in a student's college dorm room, and eight frustrating days later, end in the same dorm room. Or it can make dreamers into success stories, the ones we read about in those glossy money magazines.
Just like that lemonade stand taught us a little something about the right mix of marketing, customer service and accounting, Internet businesses are an endless source of lessons to be learned. Working for such a business is a valuable experience that even a college degree often won't offer.
So for once, close that hackneyed Econ textbook, stop thinking about your Comm school requirements, leave that midterm in the dust, and enter into a world where being unconventional means being on top, and the top is wherever you want it to be.
The New York Times recently interviewed four college students who are all senior or chief executives of their own companies ("When that Corner Office is also a Dorm Room," Oct. 22). Many students like them have dropped out of college with the "flash of a light bulb," with an idea that they believe has potential in the real market. For example, Gary Tseng, 20, the founder of FlyingChickens.com, began his company after realizing that he was paying $40 more than he needed to on a textbook he bought from a bookstore. Jeffrey Gut, 21, started CollegiateMail.com after his frustrated efforts to find cheap beanbag chairs and other college commodities.
While these companies are still surviving in their fledgling stages, their management has already taught these students life-long lessons in business management that are applicable to everyday life.
One of the advantages of e-commerce as expressed by several of the students in the article is that, unlike any other business, it is age-blind. People are much less likely to look at age as a determining factor because most of the work is mainly done through the Internet.
At the same time, starting or even working for an Internet business is time consuming, which makes students who are serious about their endeavors reexamine whether they want to take fewer credits, or even drop out of college. The potential risk involved, however, is what makes the mixture of college students and e-commerce an entrepreneurial project.
One student interviewed believed he learned more in four months than he could have possibly learned at a graduate business institution. Maybe a little self-gloating at the expense of MBA programs is part of the package of being the chief executive of your own company, but it is refreshing to see more college students explore non-conventional ways of making it in the real world.
Many students at the University have already started using their business and Internet savvy skills to take part in this growing trend of e-commerce. Two second years, Jason Craig Kearns and John Mell, have brought the dailyjolt.com Web site to the University. While dailyjolt.com is owned privately, students at different college campuses can design sites for their own schools. Both students have taken the time to advertise the site for the University community, and estimate spending about 10 hours a week maintaining it.
Other popular Web sites that supply students with job opportunities are Varsitybooks.com and Hotjobs.com. While working for a company is not quite as risky as starting your own, it still offers opportunities for students to get connected in the world of cyberspace.
So long gone are the days when dropping out of college was about finding a McDonalds hat that fits right. College entrepreneurship is now another key to the kingdom, but it often requires giving up that safety net of a Comm school major, or even a college degree.
As one student from the dailyjolt.com team remarked in light of the Times article "The ultimate plan? To take over the world!"
(Faraz Rana's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily.)
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