Opinion
TECHNICIAN
PAGE 9 • MONDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2018
You should be an entrepreneur
What if you could spend your life doing what something you love, getting paid for it and doing it as close to how you want to while still making money? Joseph That’d be a pretty great Rivenbark gig, and it’s not too far Correspondent from reality. Entrepreneurship has a number of fulfilling and practical benefits that can make your dream come true as long as you have the passion to make it into a business. One of the biggest draws to entrepreneurship is the ability to pursue your dream. That may sound cheesy, but in 2012 there were 805,985 small businesses in North Carolina; that’s at least 805,985 passions realized. And it’s not just North Carolina that’s beneficial, it’s our university too. NC State has the resources for entrepreneurship. Just on campus we have two Makerspaces (one at D.H. Hill Library and one at Hunt Library) for you to create unique products using resources ranging from sewing and embroidery machines to help you create products by hand, to Raspberry Pi and Arduino circuit boards to help you craft electronic creations, to 3D printing and scanning to bring ideas into physical form. The university also has an entrepreneur
clinic and an eGarage available to students. Students can use the clinic to observe other entrepreneurs, helping inspire and create high quality entrepreneurs. The eGarage is a physical space reserved for students to lay out prototypes of their products and talk to other members of the garage, all you have to do is fill out an application and take a short introduction. Lastly, NC State actively encourages that these resources be used to their full potential with the Lulu eGames (which are starting up this month) and Entrepalooza. The eGames are a start-up competition here at State with over $100k in prizes. Entrepalooza is an innovation festival known for its “Minute to Pitch it” event which gives students a minute to pitch their idea to an audience, with the winner receiving a prize. These events give those with limited resources financially a way to get past those limitations. The resources at NC State, combined with the dreams of students has been an effective combination too. Startups like Cree (LED company), Xanofi (nanofiber company), Agile Sciences (biopharmaceutical company) and WebAssign can trace roots to NC State. Over 100 startups can trace their beginnings to NC State; the universitykeeps a list. NC State also keeps statistics on those start-ups, with a combined economic impact of $1.2 billion on NC. NC State is all for entrepreneurship;
if you think your university is holding you back from achieving your dreams, it’s not. But if you’re still not convinced, there are plenty of practical advantages to entrepreneurship you should know about too. For starters, you get more flexibility in your hours and your location as an entrepreneur. Nothing can tell you that you can’t take the day off or go on a vacation except for your budget. Beyond the flexibility provided by entrepreneurship, it has some benefits to college students particularly. Almost every job application has a section for experience and education, and companies of course take these qualities into consideration when choosing an employee. Often times experience and education measurements fail to capture true potential and ability to work. Plenty of successful individuals lack a college education. Take Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as some of the more well-known examples: college dropouts who conquered industries. When you’re an entrepreneur, education means less and your actual ability means more. Another of the largest practical benefits is the control over your fate given to you by entrepreneurship. If you want to earn more, you work more. Compare that to a regular job, where you would have to put in an extreme amount of work to get a
raise or a promotion, and your great work benefits your boss before it ever gets to you. Beyond money, though, is a control over your own worth. Consider the following scenario: you graduate and spend a few years in some industry. Then comes along a new technology and your field is obsolete. You get laid off because your company wants to keep with the times and you can’t get a job for the same reason. This isn’t unlikely either; a study by PwC estimates that as many as 38 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated by 2030. But, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re not the one getting laid off when the world changes, you’re the one changing the way your company works, and the one who lays people off if need be. Risk is a currency and taking a risk is like spending money: do it too often and you likely won’t be able to keep it up, but just like never spending money, never taking a risk means never getting what you dream of. Often times we get stuck in a pattern, working just to pay rent and going to class so that we can get a better job. Maybe you’re OK with that, maybe you just want to get by, that’s respectable. But a large amount of students, especially at NC State, have been proven to have the desire and the ability to take the leap. Why not you?
Stricter gun control is common sense S e v e nt e e n d e a d , o f whom 14 were students and three were instructors. Headlines like that have brought chills to my spine since Valentine’s Day, the day we supposShivani edly celebrate love. On Shirolkar Staff columnist Wednesday, 19-year old Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjor y Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Cruz was known to be psychologically aff licted. We’ve barely made it through the second month of the year, and we’re already at the 17th school shooting that the United States has witnessed in 2018. Not so long ago, on Feb. 10, 2015, three students were shot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Two of them were NC State students, and one attended UNC Chapel Hill. The shooter, Craig Hicks, unsurprisingly, had a history of mental health issues, which were obviously neglected
when he went to buy his weapons. He claimed that he had an ongoing parking dispute with his neighbors, but the victims’ father believes they were targeted because they were Muslims. Though we have rightfully honored Our Three Winners every year at NC State since then, it’s not going to bring them back. The fact that horrifying events like these not only repeat time after time, but without any kind of action having taken place, is no less than gruesome. It pains me to even voice that gun violence is so common that I’m extremely scared it can happen to me or someone I love. I don’t understand why a civilian — much less a 19-year-old kid — needs a gun. I also don’t understand how people can just walk into a store and buy a gun within minutes. According to the owner of a gun store a mile away from Douglas High, the whole process, including paperwork, of purchasing arms takes no more than 15 minutes.
Cruz, who had been diagnosed with mental illness and claimed that he heard “voices in his head” telling him to carry out the massacre, had legally bought an AR-15 rif le in Florida. He had posted something about wanting to be a “professional school shooter” last September. If this wasn’t enough, his teachers at school had mentioned that he had issues regarding erratic behavior. How could all of these warning signs have been ignored? As the Second Amendment states, Americans have the right to bear arms. In my opinion, the best, most impactful solution would be to repeal it. It may sound extreme, but at the rate things are going, prohibiting guns will be more effective than strengthening mental health services and other weak methods like taxing weapons. Times have changed, and the common man does not need arms. However, not everyone is for the movement of banning guns entirely for civil-
ians, so it would be a tremendous step to, at the very least, thoroughly check whose hands a weapon with the power to kill is landing into and ensuring that only those who are authorized can gain access. Mental illness can affect anyone on the planet, and it needs to be medically treated. The NC State Counseling Center on campus provides such services for students in need. Yet, for some reason, it’s only the U.S. that allows it be manifested into the deaths of other innocent people. For instance, in Australia, mental health issues among young teens are on the rise with about 22.8 percent of people aged 15 to 19 showing symptoms of being affected. But how many times do you hear of an unstable student shooting up a school in Australia? It took Australia only one major incident in 1996, when a man called Martin
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