In this CAS experience (Creativity), I did an entrepreneurship course from Coursera by University on Pennsylvania. In this course, I learned the basics of innovation, market research, prototype testing, pitching and marketing. This course helped me build skills required for an entrepreneur, it helped me understand how everything works and the most efficient way to develop products and get them into the market. With the knowledge gained I was able to put it into the practical world where I was running my clothing business.
Learning outcome 1
My strengths were that I was strong with communications because of my previous CAS experience, as I was quickly able to make friends with others in my batch and connect with and have a nice discussion with my course mentors. I also had strong research abilities since I was able to investigate and take notes on various topics taught during the course like innovation, market research etc. My other acknowledged skill was my ability to quickly grasp the role of a CEO and how a corporation operates. My weakness that I was able to identify was that I was nervous while pitching and had nervousness because when I was having my Practice pitching I was fumbling thus I had to practise my pitch over and again in front of the course mentors who were professionals in their area. Now that I’ve done the pitching, I believe I’ve overcome my weakness of stage fright and feel really confident about it.
Learning outcome 2
The challenges I faced during the course was time management. I had to parallelly work on school assignments and also the course assignments at the same time. Also sometimes I had to reset my deadline in order to complete the task. As a result of all of this, I had to make adjustments to my routine. I rescheduled my tuitions and basketball games. Another problem I had was that I needed to be active in Phycology and Accounts in order to better sell my ideas since we’ll have to provide them figures when pitching and we’ll have to use psychology to influence the investors as well as draw clients to us. And talking about accounts, I am really bad with numbers and tables. While doing all of this, I learned Self-Management skills by creating schedules and balancing different tasks in a particular period of time.
Learning outcome 5
I feel teamwork makes a project execution better and strong. With teamwork, everyone brings their skills and expertise and accordingly divided tasks and had discussion on various topics. All of this required good communication skills, open-mindedness, being a good listener etc. These were all the strengths I had while working with team on any task or discussion. But the only issue I had when working in a group this time was that I didn’t know what other people’s strengths were or what schedule they had, so I couldn’t match their enthusiasm of work or the pace and degree of work they would’ve managed. So I arranged an extra after-class meeting with them in the weekend to find out what they’d be delighted to do since, after some study.
Final Takeaways
This was one of my most beneficial decisions since I gained a lot of new knowledge as well as enhanced my talents such as communication skills, presentation/pitching skills, planning skills, and many more during this course. I learnt a lot about business, entrepreneurship, and CEO responsibilities. This was really valuable to me since I aim to establish my own company in the future and also manage a clothes boutique where I can put the abilities I learned in the course to use. I learnt a lot of stuff from books that I would not have known about, such as prototype testing and market research.
Evidences
Certificate link : https://coursera.org/share/80ddac8597ed271d13a73c7d0549f9db