The first full week of August the past eight years, our organization has hosted a business “boot camp” for teen entrepreneurs. In initiating this annual activity, I’m proud to say we were ahead of the curve on a couple of trends that have appeared over the past few years: 1) organizations holding “boot camps” for whatever specialty they can create an intensive training event for, and 2) Apprentice-style “challenges” involving actual companies who get great product placement and consumer-driven ideas for their sponsorship.
But that’s not the subject of this post. What I think is noteworthy is the tone of this year’s camp. In years past, we’ve had as many as 220 participants in attendance, and we’ve admitted students as young as 12 (and in reality, much younger; witness the one young man who was “12” for three straight years). We also accepted every applicant: if you turned in the form, you were in.
This year, we decided to have an interview process. Not a rigorous one, mind you, but enough that 1) anyone who wasn’t really serious about attending wasn’t going to apply in the first place, and 2) anyone whose mom signed them up who really didn’t want to go now had an easy out for not having to go. At least this is what we hoped.
Guess what? It’s worked, like a charm. On the first day, we had almost zero behavioral issues. By and large, the students were quiet, well-behaved, and attentive. Distractions were at a minimum. If this makes any sense, the silence was deafening.
This silence that I was “hearing” at first had me worried, because it was such a foreign “sound.” My mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that something was wrong, until I identified the “sound” as that of teens learning. So this is what it sounds like. Sign me up for four more days of that.
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