Essay 1

At the beginning of the semester, we were assigned groups to create an innovative project that is interdisciplinary between the group members. Three of us were cybersecurity majors (Josh Whetzel, Maria Martinez, and I)  and one leadership major (Amanee Caldwell). I was nervous to participate in a group project just because it had been a while since I had done any collaboration work. I’ve been a stay-at-home dad for the last few years, so all of my previous classes were solo work. Furthermore, I was also nervous due to entrepreneurship being an unknown topic to me.

About two weeks before the initial proposal was due we started conversing over text and eventually doing a group call. Amannee, the leadership major in our group, initiated all of this and was very good at coordinating group interaction. Our initial meeting was to figure out an idea and to coordinate it between all of our majors. From the beginning, we wanted to do something that involved knowledge. A lot of cybersecurity is educating individuals and we thought that would be a good fit with leadership, especially in an employment setting, which was our original target market. We thought that a cybersecurity game would be a good idea because of its interactability, cheap to make, and sounded simple. 

In our second meeting, we actually switched to a personalized app. Amanne suggested a personal lifestyle app but cybersecurity and we further elaborated on that into an app similar to Credit Karma. The personalized and tailored route really came to the forefront from there. We also elaborated that we wanted the app to challenge the already existing cybersecurity industry, but, this quickly changed due to the difficulty of creating a  breakout product in the threat prevention industry. 

Overall, the initial part of the semester went well. I started to build confidence in my entrepreneurship knowledge and collaboration skills in my group.