Over the years, we’ve noticed that more and more students apply to the business major track when they’re preparing for college, and that’s great! But there are a few factors at play here — first, business is an incredibly broad field of study because it covers all of commerce, or, essentially, the enterprise of making money. As you can imagine, making and managing money applies to… every organization that exists, basically. Even companies that don’t aim to maximize their revenue for revenue’s sake (non-profits, for example) have to strategically finance. Marketing, finance, accounting, investment, micro- and macro-economics, management/administration, organizational psychology, and more all pertain directly to “business.”
Second, as more applicants pursue business, students have to do more to stand out as potential candidates for top universities. Between the volume of aspiring business-people and the breadth of business as a field of study, you’ll want to start preparing your resume early (yes, as early as the summer after 9th grade!) to show that you’ve pursued business with intention and that you have specific, tangible interests — it’s much more impressive when you say you’ve been following the impact of digital marketing on early-stage start-up funding acquisition over the rookie opinion that “the treasury should just print more money.” (And here’s a free piece of advice — if a man ever says this to you on a first date, RUN.) More free advice? Use your summer breaks strategically. We’ve made a guide to get you started.
Read (and Listen)
You might be thinking, if business is soOoOo broad, where the heck do I begin, genius? First of all, kudos. We should all be bringing heck back into our vocabularies. Second of all, don’t take that tone with us. Third of all, fair enough. You will not know your, uh, butt? from your elbow if you jump into entrepreneurship without getting a general understanding of business and how business practices developed over time. So that’s what you’re going to do — get a general understanding. Start immersing yourself in the business world.
The wonderful news is that there are so many accessible ways of learning. You can read classic how-to’s by those who have already made it big (Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People or Peter Thiel’s Zero to One), the biographies of business titans (Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life or Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs), instructive blogs by contemporary workers and thought leaders, and reputable business journalism (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, etc.). You can also listen to The Daily from the New York Times, which has short podcast episodes to keep you informed on current events. They often cover large-scale economic questions, like whether to rent or buy in today’s housing market or the real cost of inflation for the average American, and it’s a great way to enter the conversation of applied economies and its impact on business, domestic and abroad.
Summer Courses
Once you’ve done some informal perusal of your own, you’ll have a better idea of what interests you want to pursue and what blind spots you need help filling in.
Taking focused classes over summer break gives you a leg up in a lot of ways. You can learn about topics beyond what your high school offers, you can get instruction from professionals in the field, and you can sometimes earn college credit or get a feel for the college experience on campus. While you can always take local classes through community colleges or nearby pre-college programs, you can also find tons of valuable (and often free!) classes online through Yale Open Courses, Coursera, Khan Academy, Harvard Online Classes, and more.
Beyond that, you can attend business programs designed specifically for ambitious high schoolers in-person at many top-tier universities. We blogged about the best business and finance summer programs to kickstart your list, but if you have a dream school that’s not included here you should look into their offerings, as well.
Get Hands-On Experience
Finally, this last step is what will really put your transcript into business-potential hyperdrive! It’s a great idea to get an internship or summer job that throws you into the world of commerce head-on. It can’t be just anywhere or any position, though. There’s a difference between working for a business and working in business. If you’re the cashier for an international clothing franchise, you’re associating with a successful global for-profit business but you’re not going to learn about business strategy or administration in women’s fashion. If selling ice cream for Baskin Robbins made us business experts in the food retail sector, we’d have a dessert empire by now and not just an incredibly sophisticated scooping technique.
This is our advice: start small. This can feel counterintuitive because young people with lots of passion often want to jump feet-first into the latest tech company that’s taken Silicon Valley by storm. Unfortunately for you, and fortunately for the U.S. dollar, most high-profile start-ups aren’t hiring inexperienced fifteen-year-olds. You won’t be on the trading floor just yet, so put your Wolf of Wall Street dreams aside for now.
Conversely, local businesses and mom-and-pop stores will often hire community members to pitch in across divisions. If you’re working for a small organization, you’re more likely to see how the sausage is made. Setting up window displays, designing newspapers adverts, stocking items in the right amounts and right frequency, calculating sales prices that will bring in more customers while still increasing profit… that’s all business.
Think about it this way — answering phones or getting coffees all summer interning for Big Banking is a lot less useful in the long run than logging hours at your neighborhood store where you got to sit in on meetings to learn about staffing, inventory, accounting, advertising, and everything else that goes into maintaining a successful grocery.
There’s no shortage of ways that you can begin your transformation into the Monopoly Man. (Yep, you heard it here first —the monocle is back IN!) Whatever you do, have fun designing your summer your way — and maybe start a savings account? Or not. You do you.
If you need help developing your niche in business before college application, reach out to us today.