A leap into the unknown…

Amber Kaejs

It’s the question on the forefront of almost every university student’s mind: ‘what am I going to do after my degree?’ Many of us will go on to join multinational corporations, or extend into post- graduate studies; but what is very rare is to hear somebody say, ‘I’m going to start my own business’. But why is the path of entrepreneurship such a rarity? Why do we not follow our own dreams, in- stead of working 9-5 for somebody else’s? British culture seems far too concerned with ‘ifs,’ and ‘buts’ and then when it’s too late, ‘should have’, ‘would have’ and ‘could have.’

A close friend and I have recently taken this leap, and entered into business for ourselves; we decided to create our own body scrub company with all natural ingredients after a mutual friend told us how much she loved the one-off that we made her for her birth- day. After enormous initial interest, Sweet Sugar Scrubs now has a Christmas range coming out, and we will soon be in talks with retailers that will sell our products to a wider market. No ‘should have.’ No ‘would have.’ No ‘could have.’

We are by no means the first. Gregor Lawson, Fraser Smeaton and Ali Smeaton had an idea when they were students, and one that a lot of Pop! addicts will be familiar with: the morphsuit. They wore some themselves for fancy dress, and whilst out, received a tremendous amount of attention. The light bulb went on and they started to buy them to sell on- line. By the time it got to Halloween, they had to buy 6,000 suits due to high demand. Needless to say, they are now millionaires.

There is something to be said about not following the black suits on the tube every morning

Now, I’m not saying that my friend and I will become multi-millionaires, our scrubs will only take us so far, but for now, we have a nice little earner. Are we clever, good with numbers, or innovative, creative entrepreneurs? Not really. I had to spell check ‘entrepreneur’ a good few times whilst writing this article. We were just brave and went for it. At least any success we have is now down to us, and we aren’t putting money into someone else’s pocket. It might be tough, but there is something to be said about not following the black suits on the tube every morning.

Another notable success story on Campus is Unibubble. When asked why he decided to ‘jump in at the deep end,’ founder, Stefan van der Fluit said, “The reason I decided to create a start-up was because I felt that the best way to create some sort of change or improvement to my surrounding environment was by doing it myself, rather than sitting around and waiting for it to happen. It’s not an easy task, and it most definitely has its ups and downs but to be fair so does almost everything in life – I see it as you can either do as much work for someone else’s gain working for them, or you can try it on your own and see how things pan out.  The intrinsic satisfaction at the end of the day of being able to sit back and see direct impacts of your hard work and seeing your vision play out is incomparable to any perks of a corporate job. In a nutshell; entrepreneurship to me about standing out, being confident with yourself and expressly choosing not to fit in with the crowd – instead creating your own.”

Very often with graduates, the question, ‘what am I going to do after University?’ becomes a case of ‘who am I going to work for?’ Don’t just restrict yourself to this thinking.