We see Entrepreneurship at Yleana as a chance for our students to hone their critical thinking skills around the problem of building a business idea and pitching it. Entrepreneurship also gives us the ability to build soft skills that will help students in applying to college and later in life as well as strengthening reasoning skills and quick analytical responses to feedback.

Entrepreneurship is a lens through which we sharpen those skills which are not directly academic, but without which academic skills have no framework.

For some of our students, Entrepreneurship class is an answer to the question "Why college?" because it gives them a window into what college-level skills can lead to. All their lives, they've been told "Go to college!" but they're not really sure why; Entrepreneurship can give them a framework for the answer, a chance to look through the telescope to see what may lie on the other side. For others, it's a chance to spotlight the ways they already shine, but which aren't necessarily noticed or rewarded within school.

On the last full day of the session, in an intensive and exciting one-day marathon, students work in groups through their business plans from both a macro and a micro perspective, getting feedback and working out ideas with real entrepreneurs. They devise business ideas about which they feel personally passionate, develop presentations around those, and then compete in a Shark-Tank-inspired final showdown: There they present before a panel of successful entrepreneurs and their peers and win prizes for the most effective and creative presentations. Every year, it's an amazing, emotional, creative, rewarding day - the perfect ending to an amazing session.

Interested in being a guest entrepreneur at the One-Day Startup Fair? Let us know!