Recent College Graduate Entrepreneurship Management

[jackace]

I have recently graduated from Boise State University with a degree in Business Administration majoring in Entrepreneurship Management. My experiences in college were very positive and very informative. Business however is one of those degrees you can easily teach yourself. So a business degree is in no way mandatory to be successful in the business world.

The benefit to a degree is, after college and as a young person, it gives me a small amount of instant credibility. It's not a lot of credibility, but it is more then someone who has no degree. The other benefit to a college degree is the well rounded business education you receive. Most self-taught individuals out of necessity narrow down the topics they choose to study. In Business School you are forced to take classes in areas you have no interest. This in-turn can help you better understand the big picture.

As for whether I would recommend college for others, it would depend on what that person needs and wants. If you are a very focused person who already knows what type of business you want to start and have taught yourself the technical details of running such a business, then I would probably not recommend college to that person right away. College better suits people who are not sure what they want to do yet, and people who are looking for an all around solid knowledge base to build on. Not saying you can not obtain such a knowledge base in other ways, but school is the best and quickest way to "get your feet wet" in many different areas of business, economics, even politics.

Business school is also very reliant on case studies, and using examples from the past to clarify principles being taught today. My business school even focused on hands-on education in my senior year. We worked with actual small business owners in the community, helping them solve the problems they were facing. These problems varied for each business, but all of them were very small start-ups in many different industries.

Finally the nice thing about business school is you have an almost risk free (it does cost money) avenue to test your ideas and your business intelligence. It also gives you an insight into the investors mind. At least in my school we were able to communicate with and even have business plans judged by actual VC and angel investors. They gave us feedback on our Business plans and our ideas. They then gave us advice on how to best present our ideas to a potential investor. This type of experience and many others like it are the reasons I would recommend a college education to most individuals, especially those who are not yet decided on what they plan to do.

[robert]

great post.