Entrepreneurship and Business management Pathway Level 1: Awakening your passions (4 Hours – 16 hours)

Discovering and awakening one’s passion/ideas is a life-long process of creating connections and identifying what value we can bring to our community. Building this life connection is a process of reflection.

Programs in the Entrepreneurship and Business Management Pathway Level 1  introduce into the existing programs a system that  encourages self-reflection and search within students. Here Evergreen begins to pave the way for its students to start working on awakening and identifying their passions.

Awakening your passions – “What is your path?” workshop as part of the annual Academic Statement process is incorporated in the program.

  • We make use of the tool known as Learning Compass, by answering the following questions:
    • Where have I been? Where am I now? Where do I want to go? How am I going to get there? How will I know when I’ve arrived?
  • The workshop  itself allows participants to consider:
    • Reflecting on where you see yourself in this field of study (in essay format?).
    • What are your strengths and weaknesses?
    • If you had to focus on and develop yourself this field for a year, what would you do?
    • How would you make a living out of doing that? Do some hands-on research.
    • Identify opportunities for independent scholarships.
    • Develop a pitch (through the use of speaker-listener dynamic).
    • Practice, get feedback, and evolve your pitch by presenting it to your peers and professors.

This phase is integrated into the different disciplines at Evergreen because we believe that every human being is different and must therefore find their chosen path within themselves. This is why we encourage every discipline to foster and promote the time and space for each student to go through this self-discovering journey. We are confident that our faculty members are the ideal guides for this phase, as they are the ones who hold the most wholesome knowledge and understanding of each discipline. They are the ones with the references of the field’s role models or influences, specialized niches, networks and skills necessary; they are aware and most connected to the problems needing to be solved, and of potential ways to approach those.

Other elements we introduce that cultivate passions include:

  • Integrating health and well being.
  • Creating active listening spaces.
  • Interaction and communication with entreporeneurship incubator spaces and entrepreneurship incubator hub spaces.

Other supporting activities could include:

  • Allowing for shared time in the entrepreneurship hub space where students from all over campus can come together and experiment.
  • Introducing faculty workshops to create and encourage spaces to share best practices and learning from each other.
  • Taking students on field trips, conferences and network-creating events.
  • Organizing student-initiated events, workshops.
  • Introducing and acting as coach/mentor figures for support (faculty, alumni).

The following are some conditions/resources/learnings that are needed to discover one’s passions: intersecting knowledge, risk-taking, design process, intention and patience, self-love and love for others, self-trust and trust on others, having partners in learning journey, developing models of innovation, team dynamics and skill sets, exploration in supportive environment, networking for feedback, growth mindset and understanding of failure as a learning.

Evergreen is a progressive, public liberal arts and sciences college located in Olympia, Washington, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Learn more.