EDUCATION
success can help develop “people who go beyond
the job description” to make their career and the
company better.
“They’re the people that move more, that get
promoted more, that do more cross-functional
types of activities,” Good says. “They tend to be
the people who lead change and innovation in the
corporate environment. They’re not going to be
satisfied doing the same thing day in and day out.”
Seung Bach, a professor of entrepreneurship
at Sac State who led the inaugural Summer Acad-
emies in 2018, says all students, regardless of their
career goals, need to learn how to think like a savvy
business owner. The program focuses on the brass
tacks of business creation, from coming up with
a market analysis and a minimum viable product
to actually building a pitch deck. For a week this
summer, more than a dozen students enrolled in
the program heard from Bach and other expert
instructors and guests, visited a local “innova-
tion facility,” and came up with a product plan of
their own. Bach also wanted to illuminate the be-
hind-the-scenes work that goes into those rags-to-
riches tales children hear in the news of founders
going from college dropout to multimillionaire in
six months.
“High school students tend to think that in or-
der to have a successful business, I have to come
up with a finite product, a really good one-of-a-
kind no one else can think of, otherwise I won’t
be successful. That’s not the case,” Bach says.
“When you’re looking closer to reality, being a suc-
cessful entrepreneur takes time. It’s a sometimes
tedious process.”
Leanne Bernales, a senior at Elk Grove High
School, learned that firsthand when she partici-
pated in the Sac State summer program. Bernales,
16, says she found the complexity of starting a
business “surprising, exciting [and] kind of scary
all at once.”
“We talked to one guy who started his own
company, and he talked about how it’s not like
you’re going to be successful right off the bat,” she
recalls. “You’re going to meet 100 failures maybe,
and then you might find something that works. It’s
just a reality of it.”
In Claire’s eyes, that experience of falling short
is one of the biggest benefits of being exposed to
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entrepreneurship at a young age. A willingness to
fail, she’s found, helps develop creative confidence
in the students she has mentored and trained.
“Once they find it, it opens so many avenues
and opportunities for them,” Claire says. “They’re
really not afraid to try things out.”
The ability to adapt is a lesson she has learned
firsthand: Claire’s inaugural summer camp
spanned a week and served only seven high school
students. Since then, she’s found she can reach
more students and be more effective by partnering
with local organizations for one-day workshops
that serve a broader (and even younger) audience.
A Girl Scouts conference workshop designed “to
encourage more young women to be confident cre-
ative thinkers who are unafraid to fail” attracted
40–50 girls in 2017. Later that year, she brought
together students, parents and care providers at
Shriners Hospital for Children to come up with
ways to make the vaccination experience better
for young patients. She’s also held programming
for underserved communities, including migrant
children from seasonal farmworker families and
homeless youth.
“I wanted to take this farther, make it bigger,”
she says. “Reaching more kids was my main goal.”
ENTREPRENEURIALISM FOR ALL AGES
Robert Calvert, the president and founder of Sac
Makers, is also seeing an increased demand for
entrepreneurial programming geared toward
youth. He estimates that 80 percent of the sign-
ups for his classes are driven by interest from the
students themselves, who range in age from 10–18.
His courses, which include board game design,
programming and 3D modeling, are offered in sev-
eral formats. There are daytime courses for home-
school charter students, after-school sessions that
span several weeks and summer camps.
“There are a lot more programs today than there
were three years ago. It would have been hard to
find anyone who was doing what I was doing three
years ago within a 50-mile radius,” Calvert says. “I
don’t know that we’ve met the total demand — it’s
definitely a lot closer than it used to be — but the
demand’s definitely gone up.”
And when it comes to teaching entrepreneur-
ial skills, supporters say an early start is key. Ju-