Ideas are easy to talk about, but execution is harder.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, I didn’t want to create another discussion about business; I wanted to create an experience for those interested. Senior Ventures has given me the opportunity to provide real exposure to students fascinated by entrepreneurship.
Many students have strong ideas and the ambition to build something of their own. What they often lack isn’t creativity; it is the structure. Moving a concept to execution requires research, feedback, testing, decision-making, and the willingness to act before everything feels perfect. I want to build a space where students could actually learn that process by doing it.
The first step was building a mentorship network. I connected with numerous Darlington alumni who are entrepreneurs, business professionals, and experts who work in specialized niches such as finance. We discussed their personal experiences, the challenges they faced, and the valuable advice they would share with current Darlington students. The alumni I made connections with will now be invited to give advice and knowledge to students involved in my project. This is beneficial to students as it gives them the opportunity to network with and gain real-world insights from highly successful mentors.
With that foundation in place, we began executing.
The Product Project invited Upper School students to create something tangible, a product we could actually sell within our community. Instead of blindly selling something, we followed a four-phase model: market analysis, product development, marketing, and sales.
We started with researching, interviewing a random sample of peers, and analyzing The Dar Shop sales data with Ms. Rana Andrews, the school store manager. The data clearly pointed toward a demand for school hoodies that students could wear daily, so we decided take advantage of this demand and created a hoodie.
We moved into product execution, collaborating with Mr. Doug Hamil, head of Moser House, who has a professional background in graphic design, to help guide and refine the design. After finalizing the design, we pitched it to Ms. Tannika King, Darlington’s chief communications officer, for approval, and then got ready to send it to our manufacturing partner. We built a pre-order sales strategy to maximize efficiency and profitability.
In addition to maximizing orders, we will offer incentives for those who purchase the hoodie, such as entering a raffle to win prizes and a potential Tiger Day. Through these efforts, students will learn how to market and manage sales. Students are not just selling a hoodie; they are learning how to think and execute like entrepreneurs.
I believe this mindset should be taught from a young age. If students are exposed to entrepreneurship earlier in their lives, they gain time to experiment, build confidence, and learn from failures before they enter the real world.
This inspired me to expand my project to the Lower School, where students in grades 4-8 will participate in a Pitch Project Competition. They will develop original ideas and present them to a panel of alumni entrepreneurs in front of a live audience. I will work with them after school to guide, help them refine their presentation, strengthen their value propositions, and build confidence in public speaking.
Because entrepreneurship is not learned through solely theory, but rather through action, my goal is to give students that firsthand opportunity to move from talking about ideas to building them. Walt Disney once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." I hope my project gives students a jump start to doing and begin their journey in entrepreneurship.
Senior Ventures is a year-long academic program built on a framework of leadership, innovation and community engagement. Through a proven self-guided exploratory process, seniors whose proposals are selected for this program work independently to develop a project that’s interdisciplinary in scope and is connective, performance-based, investigative, or entrepreneurial. Click here to learn more.
