Forget speed dating, blind dates or eHarmony.com. Students who are set to graduate in the spring should look at another matchmaking service: Venture for America.
Venture for America is a new national program that pairs recent college graduates with small businesses in urban areas. The program is small; founder Andrew Yang said the program only is looking to match 50 graduates with companies. However, scale shouldn’t be an issue when it comes to helping students find employment.
The biggest thing the program will do is put graduates and small businesses in a position to succeed together.
Graduates want the opportunity to work, prove their value and be compensated for it. Small businesses are looking for workers to help them increase in size and value.
Students don’t always have the means available to them to find small businesses, and small businesses don’t always have the ability to reach the graduates they need to grow.
Neither graduates nor businesses are looking to fail, and through offering graduates resources and small businesses exposure, the program weds the two groups in a marriage of necessity. Like any marriage, the program is reciprocal.
Unlike Teach for America, the program attempts to put graduates in the field of their choice, giving them the opportunity to do what they’ve been educated to do. Opportunity is all a recent graduate can ask for, and this program provides that opportunity. The companies the program looks to pair students up with aren’t the businesses that students necessarily dream of working for. However, for recent graduates, a job in their preferred field is nothing to disregard, even if it’s not at their dream destination.
Not to mention there are added benefits to starting at the small business level, such as advancement potential being through the roof. Right now, Venture is looking to place graduates in cities such as Detroit and New Orleans.
For students who want to stay close to home but don’t know where to look, this program offers options to do just that. Living close to home should be an incentive for graduates to work and give back to community, in order to make it a more attractive place to live.
This country needs more programs such as this, more resources successful students can use to continue being successful when they leave college. Students should take advantage of the programs already in place, of course. MSU, though, can work harder to find small, local businesses to partner students with, which helps students find more job opportunities in places they wouldn’t necessarily know to look.
When America gets back on its feet, it’s going to be young entrepreneurs leading the way, and programs like Venture for America will help that happen.
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