Make the Dream Work

This past summer I worked with a team in the iVenture Accelerator for student start-ups. In short, our business model was to sell books to parents and caretakers of children, between the ages of four and seven, to help facilitate dialogue about social identities, such as but not limited to race, sexual orientation, religion, and ability status. I wish I had read the last three assigned chapters before dabbling into entrepreneurship, since I would have been able to avoid problems that arose.

Our team was just one of twelve in our cohort, and we all shared a space in Research Park. It was expected that everyone in the iVenture program be at our space on every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as outlined in the first week. As a member of the program, I personally received $2,500 for the summer as a stipend and my team received up to $10,000 to use for pushing our business along.

For the first three or four weeks, everyone was there, unless they had a meeting with a possible investor or the doctor. In those circumstances, the absent person/team would make it known well in advance that they could not make it. I had assumed that the people in charge of the program wanted us to be there because seeing other people working on their projects around us was motivating. If that was the purpose, it worked because being around people working on their businesses helped network, but I also found it helpful to bounce ideas.

As it related to our team, we never had to worry about whether or not the other members were motivated. However, we had a few prior commitments that pulled our focuses away from pushing our project further along. For example, one of our members has a child, and because of that she couldn’t be in the office every day. My other partner and I understood that they had to take care of their daughter, but we went into the program expecting to have a full team in the office every day. Prior to the summer, we never signed a contract stating what days we would be available, but it was implied that we would all be there. In this situation, I am not sure if a contract would have made much of a difference because no matter what her daughter is most important to her. It’s understandable, but it undoubtedly made us less efficient as a team.

Though it was obvious that the reason why we were in the program was to get these connections, we did not communicate that to the greater collective, so it may have seemed like we were shirking since we were not visible. Directly, our presence does not affect their production, unless they wanted feedback, which was nearly every day. On one hand we felt bad since we couldn’t help more, but we weren’t contracted to be there by paper, nor was there any tangible punishment for not showing up. At times, we chose to stay home and work instead of walking 2 miles in the summer when First Street was under construction.

The latter end of second half of the program, our team met with publishers, graphic designers, and potential investors, so it was difficult to be in the office every other day. The process was new to our entire team, and I wish that we had more contacts early on, since we did not know if we were being charged fairly for goods/services. People tended to charge us much more when they knew that we were sponsored by the university compared to when they did not. Also, we were afraid to sign documents, because the price of a lawyer who was used to the language was out of our budget and we did not want to commit to what we could not afford, whether it be money or time. If I could go back, I would have educated myself on how the people I interacted with interact with other people. 

Was it worth it?

Since it was difficult to keep up the volleyball ruse, basketball was the sport that I had played throughout high school and almost in college. I find the decision I made to pursue a college trek centered around academia to be surprisingly wise, or fear-induced. The opportunities that I took, and still take, strongly correlate with the ideals of my parents.

          Retrospectively, I should have taken the opportunities I had been allotted to pursue a collegiate career in basketball, since I, relatively, had little to lose. My runway was long, and if I decided to transfer and take a 5- year path, I would still graduate at 22.

 In the beginning, basketball was only for fun. In some respects, it was a time and monetary investment to my parents, but I did not consciously let their wants influence my decisions. I still play for fun, and I wish I had been more willing to take risks on myself in an effort to play basketball professionally. Quotes often say that courageous, successful, strong people lay everything on the line for their dreams, but those quotes may just come from gamblers that got lucky.

 The marginal enjoyment that I would have reaped, with what knowledge I have about NCAA basketball, would have been way higher than what it was as a freshman in Chemistry trying to transfer into Chemical Engineering, who ultimately chose an entirely different path. I would have picked Economics as my major instead, because it seemed like an easier major. In one token, I would have been ahead academically, but I would not have the time to focus on school as much or join RSOs and become more involved in the university.

          Resumes are important. Even though I haven’t had any “real” jobs, I am sure that a strong one can give me the opportunity of at least an interview. The other day, I was having a conversation with a graduated U of I football player, who majored in RST, and is having a tough time finding employment. He touts his experience as a football player when he speaks with potential employers, but the sport has been his main focus for most of his life. I thought his case was rare, so I spoke with other graduated athletes and learned that they had similar experiences concerning employment. At first, I thought they were underemployed, but what exactly is the professional utility of athletics, outside of the realm of athletics?  

          When I decided that I wanted to take less risks concerning my career, I was either not well informed in the investment banking/ startup culture. With a startup, I could have my hands on a unicorn, but it is more likely that I fail. This past summer, I was in a startup accelerator, and I learned that VCs and Angel investors minimize risk while maximizing reward. Often, a route they take is by investing in companies that they are familiar with. In a sense, this is oxymoronic, because history of American capitalism hints that similar firms may compete and everyone will not last. In a sense, one may see these types of funders as playing the short game, regardless of the size of investment they give.

          From the information that I collected, I was led to believe that the opportunity cost of college athletics is not worth paying, as a student whose family could afford expensive tuition, especially if I ended up making less than the median salary of people in my respective major. I could have made it to the pros, but that is unlikely. From an early age, we are convinced by family and teachers that we can do anything and should follow our dreams, but following dreams tends to be impractical, especially when it comes to business and athletics. The two are alike in the sense of opportunity cost; low risk = low reward and high risk = high reward.

            

School System Efficiencies and Otherwise

Within every stage of my life, I have been a part of some organization, but I never took an active role in them until I got to high school. As a general member, I found, and still find it difficult to relate to the group as a whole, because there are so many different personalities and paradigms for making the organization’s actions successful. I learned to determine the size of organizations in relation to the time it meets. An organization that meets infrequently, but has 20 active members, may seem larger than another that has 40 active members but meets proportionately more.

I consider my high school sports team to be an organization in its own rite, and correspondingly I was a captain. For anonymity’s sake, the sport will be volleyball. As a perceived leader, I realized how much power people in managerial positions may not have. My responsibilities were to make sure everyone went to study hours, had rides to practice, and performed to their maximum potential, while also doing all of these things and being a good representative of the team and our school. I learned that some of my responsibilities were contradictory, because, depending upon a team composition, the difficulty of keeping everyone and myself perfectly in line varies from ease to impossibility.

Growing up, I thought volleyball captains were a step below coaches in terms of judicial power, but I found myself unable to force actions out of other players, unless they saw a benefit in doing so. For some members, that meant proof that what I was asking them to do worked and for others that meant I had to do it with them. I did not know how to motivate everyone to perform better. Furthermore, I could not cut players who did not do what I said, so when I asked my supervisors for assistance, I expected things to happen right away. Change did not happen right away, if at all, because they had to do their own situational analysis so I questioned the purpose of my position. How can organizations be successful if they move slowly in their actions? Are organizations, like high school sports teams, have a shorter long-run more successful, or just more rash and ineffective? High school volleyball acted as a microcosm in my own analysis of public schools in my state.

I find the system of secondary education to be especially interesting, because the quality of education is not across the state. As my membership as a high school senior came to a conclusion, I began finding the educational system to be inefficient to my needs, but also my classmates and societal progression. With a macro approach, in an efficient, consumer-minded society, the reason would be that some students will work best with jobs that do not require academic education. It could also mean that it is societally more efficient to choose what jobs people must take. However, there are ideological and moral issues with both of these philosophies which have intersections nonetheless. If students are able to specialize their educations earlier, assuming they do not change their desired profession, they will undoubtedly be more proficient, but instead they must participate in a school with a rigid academic structure that does not align with their preferred education.  Not only does this make the education system more efficient, but it also gives people with lower incomes, who are more likely to resort to criminal activities, an opportunity to participate in more societally productive activities. Then again, it’s nearly impossible to know if a student will change their minds and decide to do something else if they are exposed to a new field of study. If, to combat this, the government (organization) chose to choose what they studied, inevitably, some people would be forced to pursue what they would not, and without violent force, they would be more inefficient.

I believe that, before all else, we should prioritize making our education system more efficient. 

Elinor Ostrom Bio

I had briefly read about Lin Ostrom prior to registering for this class, but I was not aware of the entire scope of her expertise. She was born in 1933 in Los Angeles, CA, and earned her Bachelors and Ph.D. at UCLA. She had not been admitted to UCLA’s Economics Ph.D. program, due to gender discrimination regarding what classes she could take in high school, but was admitted under Political Science. She was a distinguished professor at Indiana University, but also was a research professor and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. She has also lead research on sustainable agriculture and natural resource management through teaming up with Virginia Tech and USAID.

Through the course of her career, Ostrom has earned countless awards. She was the first woman to receive the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. Amongst her other awards were the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished award for Political Economy, the John J Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the James Madison Award by the American Political Science Association, the Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize from the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, and more. Most notably, Lin Ostrom was the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences.

I am surprised that I had not heard more about such a distinguished person who was a professor at a nearby school. I imagine that if I go further into academia in Economics and/or Political Science and Public Policy. In her research, she identifies eight design principals of stable, local, common pool resource management, which may be applicable to our class, regarding the allocation and use of resources by organizations.