For many students, owning a business while they are young and finishing a degree at entrepreneurship school is too big of a risk.

You have to invest money. You have to sacrifice time for yourself and your loved ones. While beginning a startup now requires heavy sacrifices, it can give you so much in return. These are the advantages you gain if you decide to be an entrepreneur at a young age

More credentials

Companies will base your worth for a job position on your credentials. Credentials are your different experiences and you get the position if they decided that you had enough to do well on the job. Credentials could be anything, from your college, bachelor degree, and extra-curricular. When you run your own business, you can easily add that to extracurricular.

Being an entrepreneur impresses a lot of hiring managers because not a lot of applicants have the courage to become one and those that do have traits and skills that make them stand out. You have credentials other peers don’t because they never tried running their own enterprise.

For example, college business owners are known to be better with numbers than their batch mates because they have to deal with account books on a daily basis. These books contain their expenses, assets, and liabilities.

Another skill they usually develop is digital marketing. It is no secret that a lot of higher-ups lack knowledge about the internet and they usually expect applicants from the younger generation to be more tech-savvy than them. Therefore, they are amazed at college graduates who know how to market their company and talk to customers through social media. These talented college graduates are usually startup owners at entrepreneurship school because they already developed those experiences by operating a business.

Connections

Who you know is just as important as what you know. While you can accomplish a lot on your own, you can accomplish even more with the help of others.

As an entrepreneur, you usually have more opportunities to form useful connections compared to your business. These opportunities come from you being pushed to converse with different people. When you run a startup, you have no choice but to talk to different people like suppliers, customers, and even other business owners.

As you converse with them, you realize they have resources that can help your company grow. For example, one supplier can suggest someone who can help you with marketing or you coincidentally have a friend who sells stoves for a living. It turns out that you run a food stall, so you decide to buy equipment for her but she decides to give you a stove for free out of friendship.

When you get connections, you have to take care of them because you don’t what these people might offer to you in the future.

Additional learning

While school makes you learn a lot of new things, it shouldn’t be your only source of knowledge because it cannot teach you everything. Therefore, you should find opportunities that will allow you to grow as a person. Starting a business is definitely one of those opportunities.

Entrepreneurship teaches you in a practical and emotional level. In a practical level, you will obviously develop a lot of technical skills college may not have discussed. On the more emotional level, running a business pushes you to change prior attitudes and values because it is such a difficult thing to do. All of us can choose to live an easy life by not pursuing difficult things. But, it is only through hardships do we really change. College students, after starting their own business, usually become more creative, organized, and motivated.

When you go to school, you only have to worry about yourself. So, you don’t see the point of being organized or acing any of your classes. You cram papers, you study just to pass. What’s the point of doing more than the bare minimum? All you need to is to pass. When you own a business, you cannot just do the bare minimum to thrive and running one pushes you to stop slacking and take more control.

Entrepreneurship is scary during adulthood, all the more when you decide to pursue it at a young age. Being an entrepreneur at a young age entails a lot of sacrifices but what you get in return is so much greater. Your worth increases. People reach out to you more with helping hands and you learn life lessons not taught at school.