SANJITA SRINATH

In January, people make and break their New Year’s Resolutions. In January, people craft unattainable goals and give up pursuing the wildest dreams. In January, I decided to focus on an attainable goal: to update this blog. This past month, all while creating new goals, I have also spent time reflecting on my journey to enjoying writing and to finding a passion for business.

If you were to ask my first-grade self what she enjoyed the most, you would have gotten a wordy ramble about how reading was absolutely wonderful but how writing was absolutely despicable and horrendous and [insert various synonyms of the previous.] This outlook has slowly developed through elementary school and middle school into a deep love of writing and an equally deep love of reading. Writing has grown from a chore that my third-grade teacher assigned to something I am voluntarily doing on a Saturday morning before eating a late brunch. Writing is a labor of love and I have found that if you don’t enjoy what you are writing about — no matter how much you love the activity of writing in general — it is impossible to enjoy writing. This is what brings me to my passion: business, math, and patterns.

From a young age, I had imagined starting a line of various products, building a business from the ground, and being a leader. However, these dreams in my head were as realistic as becoming the next Taylor Swift or Priyanka Chopra; impossible. And while becoming the next Taylor or Priyanka might still be impossible, doing the rest wasn’t. The summer before freshman year, I got the opportunity to participate in a course offered by Professor Santiago Umaschi from Wentworth Institute of Technology in entrepreneurship.

Now, of course, I knew the meaning of the word entrepreneurship. But I hadn’t truly comprehended exactly how much I would enjoy the research and the work I put into formulating a basic business plan for a company. And thus, I created my first business plan for a company I named Look My Books! This first business plan, in hindsight, was messy and a little unorganized, but just as writing is a labor of love, so was this. I loved getting to participate in the competition, presenting my business plan to Professor Umaschi and the board and I loved all the work I put into winning first place.

However, loving something just isn’t enough to succeed. To succeed in my pursuits of business this New Year, I plan on documenting my pursuits, so when I look back on this, years from now, I will be able to see the clear journey I charted through the waters of school and beyond.