Building Leaders through High-School Entrepreneurship Training
Fall 2023 Writing Finalist
by Chris Barrientos, Latin American Studies
#gothedistance. That’s been my motto since I watched the movie “Hercules” for the first time. Something about that phrase has inspired me to be a better person and help others. It’s helped me to endure pain and go through hard tasks in this mortal life. And it’s leading me to change the world. I grew up in the States but my parents are both immigrants from third world countries in Latin America. My parents struggled to make a living at first as they didn’t have an opportunity to receive an education after high school. They both had their own small businesses which led us to live comfortably as a middle-class family. That was my first contact with entrepreneurship.
After taking some classes in entrepreneurship at BYU, I made the decision that I wanted to be an entrepreneur myself. There are many ideas that I have right now but one that has been pressing on my mind is the need for an entrepreneurship education at an early age. It never occurred to me that I could be an entrepreneur as a high schooler since I’ve been taught to go to a university in order to get a degree all my life. I really think that if we implement entrepreneurship programs in high schools, we will see more emerging youth leaders. You may ask, how will I go about this? First of all, there is no way I can do this alone. I need a team. Together, we will need to recruit successful entrepreneurs in each school district to teach these classes at their local high school. This might be through a survey to see if they would be willing to do so. They can share their journey to entrepreneurship and inspire high schoolers to consider it an option. This process will start locally here in Utah to test out the waters. But eventually, the goal would be to implement these programs in third-world countries like those in Latin America as they would benefit the most from it.
I think the main cause of poverty in these countries is because there are not enough great leaders that can run the country well and not enough profit being produced (GDP per capita). If we can teach children in these countries entrepreneurship skills at a young age, we will see more emerging youth leaders who will eventually lead their countries. This process would be similar in that we can recruit entrepreneurs from their countries to teach a class or at least come as guest speakers. The goal would be to recruit leaders from different industries such as in food and retail. The younger generation needs us to inspire them to lead. I think in a sense we all want to change the world in some way. Or at least leave an impact on a particular community. But oftentimes we don’t do anything about it. So I’m going to do everything I can to “go the distance” through this business idea.