ENTI 407 — Survival for Entrepreneurs and Many More
When I completed ENTI 317, Entrepreneurial Thinking, in Fall 2019, I did not imagine myself taking any ENTI courses ever again. It made sense because my career goal after graduation is to become a management consultant, not an entrepreneur. Long story short, I ended up taking another entrepreneurship course a semester after — unintentionally. I was honestly just desperate to take one more course because I wanted to graduate in 4 years. Among all the classes being full, ENTI 407, Technologies for Entrepreneurs, was the only one that had space on the wait-list and I got in a week after the class started.
Now that we are approaching the end of the semester, I feel a bit sentimental to finish this course. I wish there were more in-class activities, but the unforeseen circumstance with COVID-19 wrecked them all. So here I am, sitting in my room instead of Scurfield Hall and reflecting on my experience with ENTI 407.
I initially thought this class was about new technologies that entrepreneurs could utilize, and by new technologies, I imagined fancy ones like AI and Power BI. I was not completely wrong — although I did not learn how to use Power BI, I learned how to extract people’s names from the University of Calgary (UofC)’s website using web scraping and how to automatically guess the gender of the names by connecting the data to a machine learning classifier. It was the most challenging, yet the most fun part of the class.
Web scraping is a way to automatically grab data from websites (Collins, 2018). What I enjoyed about this process was that we inspected the HTML element of the UofC website and utilized the code to build a spreadsheet function for data extraction — I felt like an intelligent hacker. It was also the most challenging activity because I was not familiar with any AI-related procedures and building a function (IMPORTXML) with an HTML code was confusing. The part where I let the AI read the extracted data and guess the gender of the names was also daunting because it took about 30 minutes to get the result for only 50 names. However, our professor, Kris Hans, provided us with detailed instructions and they greatly helped me with completing the tasks, even the tough ones like this.
Speaking of which, Kris was a very approachable and unique professor who created an extraordinary course. His lectures were not the ones we college students usually take — the ones where we just sit down, listen to professors and take notes, the ones that are frankly boring. Instead, Kris offered us many connections with industry professionals like the co-founders of SkipTheDishes, and allowed us to explore the world on our own, whether it is business or technology. This course structure with great freedom and flexibility was the most surprising because I imagined it to be very theory-heavy.
Thanks to the unique structure of ENTI 407, COVID-19 and school closure did not affect us that much. We did not have any lectures scheduled, so the only thing changed was the location of our group work and presentation. It sounds like a small change that does not teach anything, but this small change taught me a life lesson that I can use for at least 10 years; this course taught me how to work remotely.
I learned this life lesson through my group work. My peers and I worked on a consulting project for a campground reservation company and we did most of our work online without seeing each other — from client meetings to practicing our presentation, we did them all on Google Hangout. When it comes to group work, I usually set up time to physically meet with the group and work on it, because otherwise, we would not really do anything until 2 days before the deadline. This time, instead of physically meeting, we scheduled a video call and did our project; it worked perfectly. We finished our paper and slides in a timely manner and we were very happy with the outcome (hope you can see how much effort we put in them Kris). Although one member slacked off just like in every group project ever, this successful experience with remote work gave me an idea of how to work on projects without physical meetings.
As mentioned above, my career aspiration is a management consultant and I follow a meme account for management consultants on Instagram called Crazy Management Consultants (@crazymgmtconsultants). Ever since the COVID-19 outbreak and the societal movement of social distancing and self-quarantine started, this account has been posting things regarding consultants’ remote work. I was simply laughing at them because they were funny, but this following post stuck with me.
This post was striking to me because it reminded me of the importance of being able to remotely work in order to succeed as a management consultant. I saw the post when I was working on the consulting project and started to learn and pay attention to how to work well remotely. Here are my tips for remote work based on my observation and experience in ENTI 407:
- Set smaller deadlines — Ensuring the gradual progress in work is essential when it comes to creating high-quality content. Dividing up work, having deadlines for smaller pieces, and getting some fresh air is key to staying on top of things. You can have your friends, family, or partner check your progress and criticize if needed when you do not do your work as some extra motivation.
- Have time to work with others online — The largest obstacle of remote work is not having an office. To prevent yourself from getting lazy and not doing your work, schedule time to work with your coworkers or friends. The guilt of having someone wait for you over the screen will get you out of bed.
Overall, I gained knowledge in AI and methods of remote work from this course. I also made new friends who inspire me and share new perspectives. When I successfully become a consultant and get a chance to work online or remotely, I will remember these extraordinary experiences and remind myself how to work from anywhere in the world — using technology.
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