Entrepreneurship
My entrepreneurship experience is taking an approved elective for the entrepreneurship minor. I have taken the course AFST 385 which is Problem Solving in the Urban Black Community. This course examines the relationship between the urban black community and the rest of the country. It also looks at the problems within the urban black community, including but not limited to, housing issues, food insecurities, and medical needs.
This meets the overall expectations for the Grand Challenge experience because it explores the urban black community and the various problems that are associated with it and our job in the class is to explore those problems and come up with solutions. In addition, this fits the experience because we are forced to explore society’s role, policies, and the role of money in these problems. This course is being taken during Spring 2021, making it a bronze experience.
This experience is moderately tied (2) to my chosen grand challenge. This is because this experience examines the relationship between problems, such as those pertaining to the healthcare field and the urban black community. These problems and solutions that we have discussed during class gives insight into the communities that will be affected by any future technology or treatments that are created. In addition, it is important to pay more attention to those who are disproportionately affected because they are often overlooked and this class has given insight on how to do just that.
Reflection:
Throughout this experience I have learned that to solve these tough issues, it is important to not only learn from what has already been done, but to work with community leaders, do your own research, and observe community programs to really get a comprehensive understanding of the issue at hand. I found it very important to not only learn, but to listen to those who have many years of experience in the topic at hand. There is a balance between introducing new ideas and learning from those with experience. This course really forced me to think critically about issues in a way I had never had to do before.
Program Wide Objective(s):
I anticipate my experience will contribute to the program-wide learning objective of perspectivism because this class focuses on the difficulty that those in the urban black community faces daily. I myself am not a part of the urban black community and while I have seen some aspects of that through the news, my own research, and just living near Baltimore, it is very eye-opening to hear about the problems and how engrained racism still is in our system today.
Experience Specific Learning Objective:
This course has us examining a societal problem facing the urban black community and come up with solutions to that problem. We have to analyze the risk, the benefits, and how realistic our solutions are. We are to do this by talking with community leaders and doing our own research. I have learned skills for communicating ideas in a concise and logical way because we have done numerous case studies on the court systems, healthcare, community organizations, and national organizations. We discuss how they are trying to combat the many issues, such as housing, mass incarceration, and black maternal mortality rate.
Furthermore, our final project in this course is to work in teams to pick an issue and present what is currently being done to address it and what can be done to better address it. My team is working on the urban black community’s distrust in the COVID-19 vaccine. We are examining the history and how this lack of trust began and why it persists and using that to come up with solutions.
While we want to remain optimistic that all these problems can be solved and that a lot of our ideas are realistic, there is also this understanding that these issues are deep rooted into our society. To combat them, we must gain a wider approach than just introducing new policies. There also must be widespread support from not just the urban black community, but from everyone else as well and that is part of what we are learning in this class. We are learning to create more comprehensive solutions to these problems.
Personalized Learning Objective:
One learning objective that resonates with me is apply creative and innovative thinking to solve problems. This experience contributes to the learning objective because it allows us to create solutions to these very difficult problems that are deeply ingrained into our society. I have learned what has worked and not worked in the past and allowed that to shape what I think of as good solutions for the future