Bachelor in Business - University of Idaho - (Winner)
Editors Note: This student story essay was selected as the winner in BrainTrack's Business Schools Scholarship for Spring 2010. At the time of submittal, Sarah Sakai was studying for a Bachelor in Business and Economics at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho.
Wishes Had Known | Program Likes/Dislikes | Choosing Business
What do you wish you had known about selecting and entering your business school that would be helpful to others going into business?
When I started applying to colleges and thinking about different majors, there are a few things that I wish I would have known about business, both to help me make my decision and to help me prepare for that decision.
1. Apparently Business majors need to know more than addition and subtraction.
I really wish I had known that I would have to take a calculus class. I was a business major, not a mechanical engineer. But there I was, my second semester in college, calculating derivatives and graphing lines. I have yet to see the necessity of my calculus class, but more likely than not, you will have to take it too. My advice? Just get through it.
2. Business is NOT accounting.
As much I longed for the freedom that a business can bring, the older I got, the more I was afraid that business was going to be boring. When I would think about it, I would get these pictures of sitting in a dark office, squinting at numbers on a computer screen, and not seeing another human being until I left work. What I have found is that there is so much more to business than that! There is marketing. There is management. There is finance and accounting. There are information systems and entrepreneurship. There are so many different aspects of business that you can go into, and every personality type is covered by at least one of the options. That would have saved me a lot of fear had I known that going into college.
3. Just because you are a business major doesn’t mean you are stuck there.
When I graduated college, I knew that I wanted to own my own business, but I wasn’t sure if that was all I wanted to do. What happens if you like to paint? Do you just throw that away for a practical business major? Well that’s the beautiful things about business: you aren’t stuck there. A lot of my worries would have disappeared had I known that. If you like to paint, pursue that! But then with your business major, you would also know how to create a business selling your paintings. You would be doing what you love, with the knowledge to sustain that. Just because you are a business major doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything else. Much of business is a foundation for whatever else in life you want to do. Everyone has hidden dreams and desires for what they want to do with their life. Well, business just gives you the practical side to your dreams.
What have you enjoyed most and least during your business degree program so far?
Economics confused me to no end, and that was partly my fault. For whatever reason, I decided to take microeconomics and macroeconomics in the same semester to get it over with. Don’t ever do that. To complicate things further, they were back to back classes…in the same room. I would go into classroom 41 at eight o’clock and listen to one professor lecture about microeconomics, and then, an hour later, another professor would enter the same exact room and expound on the mysteries of macroeconomics. It was a student’s worst nightmare. I still am not sure what I was thinking, but I have learned that listening to your advisor is probably one of the wisest decisions a student can make.
I have most enjoyed how much better I can understand the world around me through my business classes. While it is great to know how to paint a picture, or play an instrument, or build a skyscraper, there is a measure of pride in knowing that you can understand how things work and operate in this world. My accounting classes have taught me how businesses track their money. My writing classes have taught me what high end managers expect in an email. My econ classes, though horribly confusing, taught me how individuals and groups of people think and make decisions. I am a reporter for my school newspaper, and it has been so interesting to look at a story or an event and be able to see the business side of things. You can understand things on a level that other people just can’t. It’s simple but so rewarding.
What led you to choose business as a career path?
Freedom—it’s a word that seems more attached to the artists, the poets, the dancers. But when I think business, oddly enough, the word freedom isn’t far behind.
When I was thirteen years old, my dad and I started a lawn care business. We got into our old Plymouth minivan, handed out homemade fliers to people in my neighbourhood, and waited for people to call. It started out small. My dad would use the edger, and I would mow the lawn. We charged about thirty to forty dollars a lawn, and I received twenty five percent of the earnings. As the years went on, we purchased two more lawnmowers and a trailer to put them in. My younger brother and sister joined the business, and, eventually, I would drive them to the different lawns when my dad wasn’t available. The honest truth is I hated mowing lawns. I hated being hot in the spring and cold in the fall. I struggled to back up the trailer into our little carport. I didn’t like smelling like fresh cut grass and dirt. But when I started working for someone else when I turned sixteen, how surprised I was to realize how much I missed it.
It was the freedom I missed.
When you own your own business, you are in charge of your schedule. If you have something you want to do later, you work harder earlier so that you have the time. You are in charge of what your business stands for, what it represents, what it will and will not do. You are in charge of who works for you. You are in charge of when you work and where you work. That’s all great, but what’s the point? Is it just to make money? There is unquestionably great freedom in business, but to what end? I didn’t really figure that out until much later.
I went to India on a mission trip the summer before my senior year in high school and discovered when I returned home that India had been burned on my heart. Somehow, someway I wanted to help them in the future. And that’s when the final chip fell into place. When you are in charge of your business, you can help whomever you want to.
I chose business as a future career because it gave me the freedom to help those that I felt called to help. It gave me the freedom to support those I wanted to support. My business could have the reputation I wanted it to have.
People with a heart to help someone can find the means to do that in business. That’s what I found, and that’s why I am here.