Personal Essay
Waking up in my boarding room bed at 2 AM on a warm summer day in 1988, I distinctly remember being worried about my 6th grade algebra test scheduled later in the day. I craved for my parents’ guidance and moral support but they were thousands of miles away living in another country. Years later, when I recounted this experience to my father, he confided to me, with tears welling up in his eyes, that not a day goes by without him feeling remorse for not having been around to guide me during my youth. While my parents showered me with material comforts and love, it still did not compensate for their physical absence. Experiences such as these motivated me to mentor a team of four at ZZZ, an organization aimed at preparing high school students for college. The students were mostly from broken homes with very little means of sustenance. My responsibility, when I joined ZZZ in summer ‘09, was to guide my team to conceive a product, create a business plan and present it during the business plan competition at the end of the school year.
During the first few meetings, we discussed numerous product ideas, few practical and many impractical. Though taken by their enthusiasm, I had to help them focus on a feasible product taking into account time and logistical constraints. Doing so with teenagers took considerable patience, but eventually, given our collective craving for desserts, a great product idea - “Customizable candy wrappers” was born!
We soon got to work after I gauged their strengths and assigned each of them specific functional areas. However, I realized that the team felt overwhelmed by the broad spectrum of issues to consider before building the business plan. “It is too hard”, one of the students commented, summing up the mood of the team. I devised a plan where I sat with each of the team members and identified the building blocks for each