EntrepWRneurship

ARTICLE BY CHLOE MARTINEZ | WRITER

The Entrepreneurship Project, more commonly referred to in the Woodrose Community as the ‘Entrep Fair’, has become a tradition that the students are familiar with. As a major project in the second semester, Grade 12 students must propose a business idea and turn it into a reality in their school. It is their culminating activity for Entrepreneurship Class, a core subject that will be taken up in the last stretch of the school year.

The Entrepreneurship teacher, Mrs. Jillina Borja, says that the subject is more practical than theoretical, which is why students are encouraged to apply what they have learned in the class into actual practice. While the physical selling of products had to be put on hold temporarily over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Grade 12 students of this school year, Batch 2023, are bringing back this event, introducing a wide variety of products from sandwiches to snow cones and sweaters to college entrance test reviewers.

Photo retrieved by Gabbie Reyes

Even though Entrepreneurship may sound like a more business-oriented subject, Mrs. Borja believes that the class is still important for anyone, even those who are not interested in becoming an entrepreneur. “As we learned this semester, it’s really about planning, it’s about forecasting, it’s about budgeting, it’s about working with a group, it’s about management,” she says. “You don’t necessarily need to have or launch your own business in order to make use of these skills.” She believes that these skills can be used in various career fields and that the entrepreneurship lessons can be carried on by the students when they leave Woodrose.

With regard to the businesses launched by the Grade 12 students this year, Mrs. Borja claims that she cannot stress enough how proud and how impressed she is with how far they have come. Initially, she was scared that it may be difficult for the students, considering not everyone has a business background, but she was amazed by the hard work, collaboration and creativity that the students had in making their businesses a reality. “A lot of the businesses are definitely promising,” she says. “A little part of me hopes that some continue to pursue this business despite the fact that the course is done because there is a lot of promise,” stressing that with a little hard work, many of the businesses could be very successful in the future.

This year, the Grade 12 students have been assigned mandatory selling dates on March 28, April 11 and April 18, taking up both the High School Patio and a walkway area that the High School students have dubbed as ‘Greenbelt’.

Among the businesses that were selling last March 28, Savory Seoul launched their products of homemade authentic Korean food such as kimchi fried rice, bulgogi with rice and spicy rice cake and sausage skewers. Their Chief of Operations, Gianni Park, said that the Entrep Fair was actually one of things she was excited for at the start of the school year. “The idea of creating our own products and introducing and selling them to other students, teachers, staff, and visitors really fascinated me,” she says, adding that seeing the other Grade 12 students of the previous years made her eager to start on the project as well.

When asked about the process of coming up with Savory Seoul, Gianni mentions that she had always considered Korean food as her business, noticing that, while there are a lot of Korean restaurants in her area, the food being served was not authentic and was instead catered more to the Filipino palate. With this in mind, Gianni wanted to introduce the popular Korean foods such as kimchi and tteokbokki to her classmates with a more authentic flavor to it.

In the beginning, Gianni admitted that her group experienced difficulty in starting up the business, especially in the financial aspects of their business, which was a whole new concept to many of the students in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS) strand. There was also the experience of being overwhelmed on the first day of selling, as they were bombarded with orders and payments. However, after getting through the initial obstacles, Gianni is more confident that she and her group will be able to do well in the next few days and that she will be able to carry on the lessons she learned in class in the future.

As a senior, Gianni had some advice for the younger batches who will be doing this project in the future. She believes that time management is definitely the key when it comes to starting up one’s business for Entrepreneurship. “This whole project will take the whole semester to finish. If you procrastinate, then you will receive unnecessary stress, which could possibly affect the process,” she adds, suggesting that students use a Gantt chart at the start of the semester to keep them on track. Gianni also emphasized the importance of doing one’s part in the project to lessen the burden of the heavy workload as the project is a group effort and cannot be done alone. Lastly, she encouraged the younger batches to have fun with the process of building their business and hopefully, they too will learn a lot of lessons for the future.

Mrs. Borja had advice for the younger batches as well, which was to do something that interests them and to start a business that they would enjoy doing in the long run. “When you’re young, you are entitled to make mistakes and that’s part of the learning curve,” she said, highlighting that mistakes do happen and one shouldn’t be scared of them. Another advice for the younger batches is to keep their eyes open and a lot of great business ideas are just around the corner.

The Entrepreneurship Fair will be reopening their doors to students tomorrow, on April 11, Tuesday, from 11:00am to 1:30pm in the Woodrose High School Building. Students are encouraged to explore the 15 different businesses that Batch 2023 has launched and hopefully, it will be an eye-opening experience that will encourage them to become young entrepreneurs themselves.

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