What Creates a Successful Entrepreneur?
As seniors at Woodlawn, we replace our weekly service with our capstone projects. Over our final year at Woodlawn, we plan and execute these projects, and my capstone is based around the question “What Creates a Successful Entrepreneur?” For my project, I wanted to develop and grow as an entrepreneur and luckily, I had an amazing opportunity brought straight to me through Woodlawn. Recently I attended an Entrepreneurship Workshop at Charlotte Christian hosted by Katlyn Grasso, CEO and Founder of GenHERation, a company dedicated to connecting entrepreneurial women with powerful companies such as Facebook, TOMS, and Southwest, to name a few.
At the workshop we began with opening statements and then we broke out into different groups to start our first challenge. The challenge was to create a product based on three cards that your team drew. My team drew: technology, an application, and a square (to inform our logo design). After our 30 minutes, my team created Auto-Pool, an application that works with autonomous vehicles with the goal to appeal to parents by notifying the parents once their children have arrived at their destination. We also wanted to benefit the environment by eventually replacing school buses with our autonomous vehicles, eliminating the large carbon footprint of the buses. Our second challenge was my favorite because it was a real-life problem that we were solving and our responses were actually being sent to Southwest Airlines. Southwest wants to increase employee service percentages as they travel the world. After our 45-minute planning period, almost every single group decided to add a section to the Southwest app that employees could fill out based on their interests and travel schedule. Then their service opportunities could be custom-tailored to their interests and employees would be notified weeks before their flight of opportunities that might interest them.
After the workshop and through all of my capstone research, I have been able to directly apply the entrepreneurial skills I have learned into my own self-presentation. Woodlawn has allowed me, through a wide variety of opportunities like this workshop, to easily develop into someone who will be confident when attending meetings, interviews, or presentations during my upcoming college years. Because of Woodlawn’s ability to truly activate students and seek out their potential, I have been able to shape myself into a confident leader. I will forever be thankful for all Woodlawn has done to shape me into the person I am today.
Will Hedrick has attended Woodlawn since 2007 and is in the graduating class of 2018. He plans to attend University of North Carolina Wilmington or High Point University and study International Business/Entrepreneurship.
