How to Live the Dream in College

Written by Matt September 28, 2009

4.8 (4)

If you're in school right now, you're facing a great entrepreneurial opportunity. By combining your university's immense resources with the safety net of full-time matriculation, you can make your American Dream a reality. The college campus is a fertile ground for innovative experimentation, so here are the five ways you can use your student resources to make it happen.

1. Use the libraries

Francis Bacon was right when he said "knowledge is power." Fortunately for you, college libraries are exceptional sources of knowledge. They house great classics, obscure treatises, and modern best sellers alike. They are arranged in such a way that while finding one book you desire, the books around it are talking about that exact same subject, in an ancient version of Amazon.com's "if you like this, you'll also like.." feature.

Whatever your chosen entrepreneurial purpose, your college library offers a wealth of knowledge on that area that you are guaranteed not to learn about in your classes. Whether you want to start an investment banking firm or a flower shop, you should first learn from the people who have tried it prior, and you can find all the information in your college library. It's not going to be in your syllabus, that's for sure.

In the 21st century, your school has even more to offer in the form of online subscriptions. Your college or university spends millions of dollars on subscriptions to various sources of knowledge (JSTOR, LexisNexis, AP, etc.), giving you access to the kind of information you would have to pay big bucks for anywhere else. Your college library allows you to tap in, for free, to the collective experiences and knowledge of humankind. You aren't interested?

Entrepreneurship is about finding new ideas, and your professor is the last place to find them. If you want to get the facts, you should do your own search. Before you step out into the real world, it's better you learn a little bit first.

2. Take advantage of your access

Being a college student has a second advantage yielded by your employment as full-time knowledge seeker. You can get people to tell you much more than they'd tell anyone else, simply by posing as a student performing a study, and especially if the interviewee is an alum of your school. You can interview anyone as a college student doing a study. And best of all, it's true!

Thus, your market research gains an upper hand - you can actually infiltrate your competition (or potential customers) before they even know what you're doing. It's the Trojan Horse method of market research, or perhaps the James Bond method of market research. It allows you to innocently gain the information these people would normally be reluctant to share.

People will give up more information, and you can thus gain the type of market research that will enable you to do so much more with your degree. Most importantly, you'll be doing what your peers aren't - living the Dream.

3. Learn everything you want

The collegiate major system is a total sham. What seems like a good thing (many fields of learning) is actually a devious trap in educational practice. Most college academic departments are pits of intellectual incest, stuck on the gratuitous exposition of their own subjects without any connection whatsoever.

But you can turn this disadvantage to an advantage by crafting your own interdisciplinary curriculum, expanding your base of knowledge. Pick the major that helps the most, but take as many electives related to intuitive interests you have, always looking for opportunities of entrepreneurship in those fields.

Balanced knowledge makes balanced people. In the 21st century age, it's not access to facts that creates intelligence, it is access to ideas that effectively synthesize these facts.

4. Apply your loans wisely

As a college student, you have the ability to borrow substantial sums of money, and pay them back on terms better than the average citizen does with credit cards or consumer loans.

Like most powers, it comes with great responsibility, and it can be squandered. Nevertheless, I argue against the conservative contention that such credit access is to be avoided and shunned.

You can use your student loans in order to develop your business. Your "living expenses" can be transferred into substantial business investments if you can live lean (think Top Ramen). Think about it this way. You can do the average, and end up in a $30-40,000 job after school. Or you can take the risk, put yourself out there, and make twice as much or more with a successful new venture.

Thus, I should add the disclaimer that this is not to encourage reckless behavior. It is simply to observe the opportunity for responsibly ambitious young Americans to fund their pursuit of the Dream.

5) Get your peers involved

In college, everyone has time, and likely either wants to make money or change the world, and sometimes both. You can exploit this fact for manpower (or womanpower) to help grow your organization/business.

If your entrepreneurial organization is established, you can provide internships for students. Not only do you gain free labor, but you also gain free market research. Otherwise, your peers remain an excellent source of potential partners and employees. They are the most likely to take risks, the most likely to trust a young person's leadership, and the most interested in something new.

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