It’s finals week. Most students are studying for their finals and will be all week. I’m finishing up my last semester of classes and am just trying to pass business law. I’ll be spending the rest of my time running a business out of my basement. Because I failed and I have 122 extra boxes leftover from a My Pop-Up Shoppe that I ran at the Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative at Iowa State University last week.

I drove to Ames on Saturday morning and got all of the leftover inventory and then headed back to Lincoln to set up Shoppe in my small duplex. I’m printing, shipping, packaging, and selling everything from my basement. I get to run my own My Pop-Up Shoppe for the week.

And guess what — I am so excited. I’ve been dreading finals week for months. Now, I get to take on a new challenge and run a small business instead of studying for my exams. I get run down and completely exhausted during finals week. This failure has made me more excited than I have been during the entire semester. The adventure of my seven hours of driving on Saturday reminded me why I began to love learning through entrepreneurship in the first place. One of the main reasons is because entrepreneurship embraces failure.

Failing has taught me more than winning or succeeding ever has. My business model is still not working. I created a solution that educators find valuable and engaging. Students love it, they gain real experience running a real business. But it’s still not making money. Heck, now I’m stuck selling 120 boxes in my basement to keep going. I created a solution that works and I’ve been co-creating with customers for a year, yet I still need to keep learning and iterating. If I do not figure out this business model it’s not a viable business and I’m wasting my time. And this is what I was reminded by through failing.

This is why entrepreneurship is exhilarating, humiliating, and so stinking hard. This week will teach me that I still do not have it figured out and I need to keep discovering. But it has also re-awoken my entrepreneurial spirit.

If you’d like to help out and want to buy a Christmas gift — here is the link to the Christmas boxes. Help me ship one more box out of my basement during finals and learn way more than I will during my business law final.

We are empowered to learn as students and you are not limited to the learning that happens in University lectures. There are so many resources and opportunities available to students, and if you are not taking advantage of them you will lose that job offer to another student who chose to take advantage at what was in front of them.

Here are a few tips that I’ve used during my college experience to make the most out of my education:

Pick classes that allow for individualization. I take entrepreneurship classes where I am granted the opportunity to actually work on my own startup. I don’t have to go to class and I work with a professor one-on-one to gain mentorship. I also pick classes that allow for as much real-world experience as possible. Some courses will match you with a business or company who presents a problem to solve over a semester. I’ve learned more from controlling my own learning and moving at a pace that works for me than I did in any standard lecture.

Go to extra workshops, speakers, and events. Universities and colleges are always bringing in speakers and offering free workshops, take advantage of these free opportunities. Watch for unique opportunities to attend small gatherings or luncheons to get a personal experience with the speaker. Ask questions afterward and get to know the person presenting — this is networking. Follow your college’s social media, sign up for department newsletters, and watch student organization pages to find events.

Start your own business. There probably isn’t a better way to gain more experience or learn more while you are in college. There are also a crazy amount of resources available to students through pitch competitions and grants. Check out the entrepreneurship clubs and programs on your campus to learn more about starting your own business. But, the hardest and most important part is starting — just go do it and take the risk. It’s scary but it will pay off.

Run your own blog. Starting your own blog seems intimidating and it does require some work. But the rewards are extremely beneficial, especially if you have a related major: marketing, communications, advertising, public relations, English, journalism, broadcasting, entrepreneurship and many more. Find a unique topic that you want to share with others or pick out something you want to learn. I created a blog sharing the stories of refugees in Nebraska when I was a sophomore and all I had to do was find people to interview and write their stories. Publishing and marketing the blog was my first big step towards becoming an entrepreneur.

Find and meet with mentors. Mentors can provide you with valuable advice. They’ll help you navigate college, make career decisions, and offer pieces of wisdom you can’t gain from a textbook. Meeting with mentors is also one of the best ways to learn how to network and connect with professionals. They’ll also connect you to their friends and other potential employers when you are looking for a job or a connection. There is an easy step to start — reach out to someone you look up to in the community or someone with a job you are interested in and ask them to get coffee. It’s that simple.

Read. This is so valuable. Educating yourself is one of the most valuable things you can learn while in college, and reading is one of the best ways to accomplish this. Pick up any book that interests you and make yourself an expert on a topic. If you serve in any leadership roles you should be reading every day so you are equipped with the skills and knowledge you need to lead others. There is so much more to learn besides the content in your economics book. I promise it’s more interesting too.

Teach yourself new skills. We live in the age of Youtube and how-to’s and you need to start taking advantage of it. My first internship required me to do graphic design and be able to develop Wordpress websites. I didn’t learn either of these skills in my classes and I had no idea what I was doing on the first day of my internship. But, Youtube became my new best friend and I can now put graphic design on my resume and build Wordpress websites.

Go to conferences and competitions. They take a lot of time and seem like a burden sometimes, but conferences and competitions are great learning experiences. You meet people from across the country and network in a real way. Not to mention you have to plan your travel and act like a real adult when you are on your own in a different city.

Be active in student organizations. Clubs are a great way to gain experience and get hired but just having a marketing club on your resume doesn’t do anything. Employers are looking for real skills and experiences and sitting at an hour meeting every week won’t impress employers. Holding a position in a club is what can really provide value. Serving as a president, marketing meetings, and planning events are the real skills that employers are looking for; so go out and run for a leadership position in your clubs next year.

These are just a few pieces of general advice, but they have the power to change your college experience. Stay tuned to hear from a series of student entrepreneurs that will change the way you think about learning in college. They break the mold of the typical college student and they’ll offer some unique tips and advice.

There is an overwhelming trend for what students desire in their education — interactive, independent, experiential, hands-on learning.

As a student studying marketing and business education — two of the most hands-on skills and careers — I can firmly state that I do not have the opportunity to engage in interactive and hands-on learning in the college environment. I’ve identified that my peers are verbalizing this exact same issue. Academia is preparing students for the working environment through dry, standardized curriculum and depriving students of one of the most fundamental development blocks — hands-on learning.

I am not degrading college. Academia and the traditional university environment are needed, and this is the right type of learning for certain students. It is not the right type of environment for every student, especially entrepreneurs, but that is an entirely different blog post.

Entrepreneurship is one of the purest forms of hands-on learning, so why are more students not learning this skill at an earlier age? Why is academia teaching most courses in contradiction to hands-on learning? And why aren’t more students activated and motivated to go out and find their own sources of hands-on learning through entrepreneurship?

I’ve been asking myself these questions since I created My Pop-Up Shoppe. If students are so excited to engage in hands-on learning, why aren’t they just creating it themselves?

Over the past six months I’ve been educating myself about every fiber of student’s motivation to learn entrepreneurship and engage in independent learning. I’ve noticed one huge trend, most students don’t realize how empowered they are to just go out and start learning on their own. After every My Pop-Up Shoppe weekend I hear numerous students state, “I could go start my own business now.”

The bottom line is that students could start their own business before My Pop-Up Shoppe. They could also engage in experiential learning and teach themselves the entrepreneurial skills they learned during the weekend. But, they’ve been conditioned and trained to learn in a standardized and cut out way. No one has told them they are capable of so much more and have the power to learn right at their fingertips.

The main goal of My Pop-Up Shoppe is to help students learn. The model is working, I’ve been able to help students engage in hands-on learning through a weekend of running their very own startup. This is a small win, but I want a bigger win, I want to disrupt higher education and change the way students learn. And I think that higher education should watch out because most of my peers want to see change too.

Take advantage of your internship experience and do not settle. Find something you enjoy, it’s out there I promise. The search might just require a little digging and elbow grease. Here are a few reasons why I loved my internship experience at the NMotion Accelerator:

I had a great boss.

Beth McKeon was my boss at the NMotion accelerator and my internship also came with her mentorship. I enjoyed working with Beth every single day and she helped me develop and grow as an intern and a person. When you are interviewing or looking for an internship, make sure you enjoy spending time with the people you will be working for. The culture and environment of the organization has the power to create a bad internship before you even start.

I was learning.

If you’ve seen The Last Jedi or read The Hard Thing About Hard Things, then you know the best way to learn, is through failure. My internship provided an environment where failure was accepted and embraced, and that is why I learned so during my two-years at NMotion. I didn’t have to do every single thing right, but I did have to learn enough from every failure to never make the same mistake again.

I found an industry I am passionate about.

I love entrepreneurship, and I knew that before I took my internship. I found something I loved first and then I went out and found an internship in that industry. But the odd part, I was an accounting major at the time I took my internship in the startup education industry. It had nothing to do with accounting. I figured out that what I loved doing in my extracurricular activities, were the same experiences that helped me land an internship in entrepreneurship. My advice to students — participate in clubs and programs that you love, then you’ll find the internship and industry that aligns with those skills.

I did the hard jobs.

Every task I completed as an intern was not fun. Internships are the lower level of work that don’t require as much experience, that is the bottom line and root of an internship, and we must accept this as students. I am not suggesting that students do all of the grunt work and mindless projects. Students are brilliant and have the power to do anything they set their minds to learn. But, in order to gain the experience and mentorship from the people above me at NMotion I dove into the dirty work and got it done fast. Then I could move onto the more challenging projects. It also showed my boss that I was willing to get things done and work hard, which is a large part of the reason that I had the opportunity to do more challenging projects.

I taught myself what I didn’t know.

I didn’t know how to do a lot of projects before I took them on, but the reason I completed all of my projects was because I learned as I went. I taught myself the skills I needed to know to complete a task and moved quickly. Otherwise, I would have been fired after the first two-weeks. The more open I was to failing or taking on a project I had never done, the more rewarding the projects were when they were completed.

Internships are the best career move most students can make in college, not because they look good on a resume, but because when an internship is done right it can help students learn real skills and gain real experiences. These real skills and real experiences are why students are hired, not a loaded resume.

So employers, I challenge you to bring value to your internships. Invest in your interns, give them real work, let them use creativity, and give them the responsibility of making their internship an opportunity.

And students, I challenge you to search for internships beyond what will look good on your resume. Look for an internship where you will have a great boss, where you will learn, where you find an industry you are passionate about, where you can do the hard jobs, and where you can teach yourself what you didn’t know before. Then, you will love being an intern too.

Business say that most students cannot be hired because they don’t have enough experience.

Students are being turned away from internships and jobs because they don’t have experience.

I’m defining the space in the middle of these two problems, The Experience Gap. Businesses want students to be experienced before they hire, but students need a chance to receive their first experience. Both outcomes do not work together.

I’m working to solve this problem and the solution is not an internship or a University lecture. The solution involves a new type of education for Millennials and Generation Z. Entrepreneurship can provide a mindset that every single student needs.

Students have the ability to go out and create their own experiences, but they haven’t been taught they can yet.

Stay tuned to see how I’m solving The Experience Gap.

Internships are the purest form of experiential learning — if they are done right. This is what I’ve learned from both being a student and managing student talent.

Students need to learn…

by doing. What students are being taught in the classroom looks significantly different than applying and practicing the skills in real life. Nothing else in this post can be accomplished without experiential learning.

My classmate, Colton Siebert started a sales internship this summer at Hudl. He shadowed other members of the sales team and did a ton of research about the products. Colton was pushed to start calling early on because he could only learn to make a sale through experience. When he was on the phone with clients, he truly started grasping the sales process.

professionalism. Employer expectations are much different than what is expected of students in any other culture or environment. This ranges from being on time, knowing how to dress, networking, taking notes, being prepared, directing questions, interviewing, negotiating, and so much more. Most of these skills aren’t expectations until you hit the workforce and first-time interns will most likely not have them yet.

The two design interns at NMotion this summer were completing projects for six different teams — a hard task to manage. They started out having to redo designs, but after a few mistakes they developed a design process to gain feedback and communicate. Christina said, “Not only did I learn to ask questions quickly, I learned how to ask the right questions.”

problem solving. This is essential in the startup world and something that every intern needs to be successful in a startup internship. Interns need to be challenged to think like they are solving a problem before they ask questions.

One of my firsts tasks as an intern was creating a SlideShare for Liberty Mobility Now. I had never done any design, so as a default, I began using Powerpoint. My finished Powerpoint product was not professional, and I went back to the drawing board. The next day I taught myself InDesign through tutorials and by the end of the summer was able to design an entire pitch deck for the NMotion Demo Day Showcase.

independence. Being cued in college with assignment dates, study guides, and guided curriculum is not the way the real world works. Interns must be able to work on their own, make decisions on their own, and be an employee on their own.

One of the business interns, Connor was tasked with helping an NMotion founder create a business plan for a grant. This was a huge task and Connor utilized Google, an intern’s best friend. He completed the project in his 12-hour week and learned what the state is looking for in grant applications.

Employers need to learn…

age doesn’t matter, potential does. Age is not a determinant for a student’s potential. Employers miss out on talent when they judge an intern by their age. Employers do not need to put an age on internship applications.

I started out studying accounting at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t apply for an accounting internship once because applicants were required to be a junior or older. A few weeks later I was elected as my sorority’s treasurer, where I now manages the sorority’s finances, run financial statements every month, and execute on the budgets of over 20 officers.

how to do it first. As a founder or manager, you must always know how to do the work before you assign it to someone else. There are instances where creativity from interns is essential. But, after watching many startups work with interns, the successful projects are the ones where founders already have the know how. A project was never successful if an employee did not know how to complete it first.

One of the NMotion founders assigned our storytelling intern, I Coleman, the task of creating new messaging. This ended up being a fun project for I, but the task started out without any parameters. A lot of time was wasted trying to determine the end deliverables. Ultimately, a new boilerplate and slogans were created; the founder did get new messaging, but it took double the time. The project would have been much more streamlined if the founder knew what he wanted first.

to think from the intern’s perspective. The communication of a task or project is the lifeblood of its success. You know every inch of your company as a founder, but interns do not and you must explain projects from that perspective.

The NMotion interns were tasked with putting up new vinyl logos on the office wall. The design interns prepared the files. Then, the business interns used a vinyl cutter at a maker’s space and came home with the finished product. The only problem — the finished product was double the size of every other logo that was already on the wall. We learned fast and a spec sheet was created so that every team had to think through their tasks and write down the specifics, including the file dimensions. The interns had new logos on the wall the next week and a spec sheet for every project they would complete.

to work with employees. Hiring interns is a great way to practice taking on employees and contractors. Working with employees and interns is challenging and you must be willing to learn as an employer to make it successful.

After the first week of our internship program, the NMotion team reviewed the tasks our interns had completed. One task was to create a startup welcome guide for Lincoln, Nebraska. Three separate interns began working on three separate welcome guides — and no one realized until the end of the week. We then implemented a giant scrum board so the interns could track their projects and still remain transparent with the different teams. It evolved over the life of the program and was essential to our successful project management.

Running an internship program is challenging. Throughout the summer I’ve made mistakes when working with our interns, but those mistakes are what helped to make the program a success. Working with NMotion’s six interns has taught me that employers can learn so much from and with interns.

Keep reading this series to learn more about running an internship program and working with student talent.