My Entrepreneurship Story

Growing up, my peers and teachers did not consider me a nice little girl. I was rather destructive and my parents often worried because I was sent to the principal’s office of Martha Manson Academy on numerous occasions. I attended this small private school, which eventually changed its name to Oak Hall, from pre-k to 8^th grade with the same sixty people. Although I did make a few life-long friends at this school, I found that the majority of my friendships were with gals and boys of the local public middle school. For this reason, when it was time to make a decision on where I would attend high school I did everything in my power to leave the private school I had spent the past ten years. This was not an easy task and entailed multiple phone calls between my parents and the parents of my friends, a power point slide of pros and cons and an acceptance letter to the Academy of Entrepreneurship at Buchholz High School. Ultimately, I acquired exactly what I wanted and started at Buchholz High school as a naïve 9^th grader. Keep in mind, this was solely because my parents had a niche for business and thought the Academy was exactly the path I needed to go down.

Regardless of the tough year it took me to adapt to this new lifestyle as a public school student, my parents were right in telling me to pursue a path of business. As a tenth grader, I became heavily involved within the Academy of Entrepreneurship and a club called DECA. I competed at both the state and national levels for a 5K I created and hosted in order to raise money and awareness for the Brain Aneurysm Foundation. The cause was close to heart for many reasons but primarily because I had lost a half-brother to a ruptured aneurysm before my birth and came close to losing my father at the age of three. The following year, I held a Texting and Driving Campaign to promote the prevention and awareness of this problem within the Gainesville community, and the state of Florida as a whole. In both my junior and senior year, I competed at the national level in a category called School Based Enterprise.  Within the Academy of Entrepreneurship is a store that is operated by the students where both food and merchandise is sold on a daily basis. As the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Academy I had the opportunity to make the two presentations on how it was run.

Since I began my freshman year at the University of Florida, I have been interning for an organization called LovEd, which focuses on teaching relationship education at seminars and events. Currently pursuing a degree in Public Relations in the Innovation Academy, I felt ENT3003 would be an interesting class that I could learn a lot from.