A (30:00)
Like what business wants a 17 year old's help in any real sort of business way. Finance, accounting, investments. Some kids get lucky with a connection through their parents or, you know, sometimes by their own initiative. But it's really kind of tough. Most high schools don't teach. You know, it's hard to take a business class. You can take economics maybe, but it's hard to get exposure, I would say, to business before you get to college. So, yeah, I think it's worth talking about how some kids have done it. So the one young woman I want to talk about, she had an interest in two very specific interests. One in entrepreneurship. She was just kind of one of those people who wanted to do her own thing. She always knew that. And also kind of global community service. So she did two things simultaneously. In ninth grade, she started doing these trips with this company called Moondance Adventures where she would travel for two weeks over the summer and do a very intensive community service project. So she did something with coral reefs. I mean, these were more intense and more immersive than a lot, like a lot of hard work, challenging. So you're either that person, you're not. But she started doing that and then she also started her own jewelry business, just making beaded jewelry, selling it online. And she would give a percentage of her profits away, which is a nice, lovely thing to do, but, you know, not that earth shattering. So as she got older, she kept doing the same thing. So summer after sophomore year, she did the exact same thing. Then summer after junior year, she went to Georgetown for their entrepreneurship program. She specifically targeted that one because there's an element of social impact to it. So social impact, entrepreneurship. And there she actually really learned what it meant. So it's funny because a lot of business schools, when you're applying to the undergrad program, they'll say what's a business issue that has a social component that you're interested? But you know, that's a hard question. That's a very complex world. And she actually took a class and really got a deep understanding of what non pro, you know, how to organize nonprofit, the difference between for profit and nonprofit. I mean she really, really learned a lot and became very committed to, to this idea of starting a company with a social component. It was super believable given that all of her sort of stuff came together. She read a book that she literally was life changing. I can't remember the name of the book, but was life changing for her at that program. She contacted the author and had sort of correspondences with him. She was really a go getter. Anyway, she ended up going to Georgetown. That was her first choice, Georgetown Business School. One of the reasons is because there's their entrepreneurship program is really focused on social impact versus you know, at Babson or some other places where it's not, you know, there is, that's accessible but Georgetowns is really is really focused on that. So that was a perfect fit for her and she ended up going there. So that's one example of someone I've had business kids do all kinds of things. And honestly, you know, the few kids that I'm about to mention now went to all the same sort of level of business school, you know, level of selectivity. So I've had kids, as I mentioned, take Coursera or EDX classes. There's one specific one that a lot of my kids have done on Coursera called Financial Markets. It's a Yale class. There's also Introduction to Corporate Finance given by Penn. You know, they're really high quality classes. So last summer I had a kid do financial markets and also work on building his own business. He wanted to be an entrepreneur, but nothing to do with social impact. He created a golf related product with two friends and they developed it, came up with a prototype, did a business plan, got some investors from family friends, but pitched it, worked really hard pitching it to golf clubs, to public golf courses, to individuals, to stores, and they actually did pretty decently in sales. That kid ended up, he was an athlete, he was a golfer. He ended up going to Notre Dame for business. He got into Georgetown too though. And then another young man went to the Wharton program, the finance program there and did some amazing work. I mean that's a pretty robust program. It's it's selective. I'm not sure how selective it is because I've never had a kid not get in. But anyway, he ended up doing evaluation of an energy company and presenting it to, you know, a panel of professors. That was a very valuable experience for him because he literally learned how to do part of what you learn how to do as a first year analyst at an investment bank. So then when he went, you know, interviewing for investment banks afterwards, he really had something to talk about. You know, I had a kid work at a hardware store who did the same thing as that young woman with yoga. He got involved in the books. He started, you know, doing some accounting for them. And also, you know, they. That hardware store kind of came upon some hard times and he helped with kind of marketing and analyzing margins on certain products for them so they could be more profitable in terms of their. What they were carrying. So let me see if there's any other kids. So online classes, college classes, working on building your own business or creating your own business, getting a job, having an internship. I've had kids have internships at like investment companies. I mean, obviously that's sort of through connections. And to your point earlier, Lisa, that can be a really rich experience or it can be nothing. And I would say putting the name of an investment company on your resume means nothing. If you have nothing to talk about, you know, what you did or what you learned, you know, it's not going to impress anybody that you ran errands at some investment company.
