Why should you volunteer in start-ups? Here’s why.
As you know, volunteering means doing a job without waiting for something in return. Taking an action for free and from the heart. As a person who works voluntarily for 8 years now, I will try to bring the reasons together why you should work without a benefit — why working without a profit actually is a profit for you, and especially why you should volunteer in start-ups before you graduate from collage.
Of course, volunteering in social projects and volunteering in start-ups is way too different subjects. You should definitely try both. In my experience, doing voluntary work in social projects satisfies the person’s conscience in a spiritual dimension. Volunteering in start-ups is more of a experimental knowledge gaining.
Start-ups are the innovative foundations of our golden digital age. The free spirited people who desire to change something in this world and believe that the solution is not in cooperate companies, start the ups.
Working in a start-up means a lot of things. Entrepreneurship is fun, it’s full of adventures, requires mobility and continuity, involves fast and long working hours. You get to know a lot of people and become inevitably innovative and mobile. Becoming a entrepreneur is doing more than what your job description requires and loving it. It is indeed not for everyone, and surely it doesn’t have to be!
But you simply can not know if you are an entrepreneur or a cooperate person, without trying both.
Here are the five ultimate reasons why you should definitely volunteer in start-ups while studying.
1- Gaining Experience
As a collage student, everyone expects from you to fill a great CV. Suggestions and roadmaps fill your head by the people with more experience as you get closer and closer to graduation. You should do this and you should do that. And you probably start getting more anxious thinking that everybody is better than you, everyone worked out their way and you just got left behind.
That feeling is normal, but it is not permanent. There are a lot of ways to start your career by gaining experience and it does not have to be 1000 peaced puzzle. Start-up envoriment actually needs the young blood and excited minds since it renews itself minute by minute everyday. So youth labor is very required in the entrepreneurship world.
In a win-win situation, the start-ups need you and you need the start-ups. Many companies open voluntary positions in their start-up since most start-ups are not making profit yet. Why wouldn’t you give it a try!
You can fill your CV by working as a volunteer in start-ups and voluntary work always look good in a resume! The main reason for that is bigger companies love to see that a student spent time without waiting for a benefit and worked hard for something from the heart. You can start your career now.
2- Network
Working in a start-up will provide you more experience than you expect, but that is not the only thing that you will get. You will also notice that you start meeting with new people… A LOT. Entrepreneurship ecosystem is weird.
Everybody somehow knows someone. You will see that everything in this ecosystem is connected, and at first it will suprise you. But when time passes and you adjust yourself to introducing yourself again and again everyday all over, you will also see that this is how the start-up world works. Your confidence will start to built up. And you will probably love it.
At first your network will start with the start-up you are working in. After that you’ll start to get to know the rival start-up that does the exact same thing as you. Subsequent to that, new cooperations will bring new people. New people will bring new ideas and new ideas will bring along new people.
You should literally collect as many people as you can before you graduate because after you do, those people will show you your way. The more people you know, the more light you have on your street of business life. Everyone you meet will teach you something new as you will to them too.
You probably will work with someone you met while you were a volunteer in start-ups or maybe even start your own business with someone you already worked with. Just be yourself and be kind, you may never know which person will open your opportunity door.
3- Killing The Time
Collage is somehow a time period that you have time for everyting and nothing. You have a lot of homework, final weeks are just right after the midterms, bunch of presentations in class and writing articles about the things you have no idea of.
It is also the time to make friends, getting drunk every night, going to parties or pull out an allnighter in a library reading your favorite book. Keeping up with your social life, the last thing you want to do is spend hours on working for a job that you don’t get paid for. Bad News Barrett announces: student time is the time to suffer.
Sorry to let you know, but sometimes you have to sacrifice things in order to have some things better. Sometimes making a profit is not always in cash. It is great if you earn some — you can do it at home too, it’s just not the main reason why you should work your penguin off before you graduate.
You have a lot of time before you throw the cap in the air, you just have to learn to manage time. You should use this time to invest in yourself and being a volunteer in start-ups can help ypu.
If you are bored from classes and your social life, you can meet with new people by becoming a volunteer in start-ups. Win-win.
4- Trying Everything
It is really hard to fill a CV when some companies are playing very hard to get. When you graduate, you start facing problems like the job descriptions that requires fresh graduates to have at least 1–2 years of work experience. Getting a paid internship is hard these days, competition is getting rough.
But if you decide to volunteer in start-ups, you will see that you are collecting the right kind of knowledge and experience. Of course this doesn’t mean that every start-up accepts every candidate, naturally no, but at least you can try! And also we have to admit that start-ups are more open to intern candidates that doesn’t know the job but is willing.
Most start-ups look for passion, desire and will of hard-work. This means you may not fulfill the description but you may show them that you are open and ambitious.
Also being a volunteer in start-ups can offer you one other great opportunity: Trying everything! Let’s say that you are studying Business Administration and have no idea if you want to work in Sales or Marketing or Growth… Maybe even realize that becoming a Marketer or Sales Specialist is not for you.
When you think about it, it is very hard to find paid internships in every department. But when you are working voluntary, the choices and chances are more clear. This way you can discover yourself; do you want to be an entrepreneur, do you want to work in an office, want to be a freelancer, want to start your own company, work in a cooperate firm, want to change your career path to something you didn’t study etc.
It’s definitely a win-win situation.
5- Volunteer in Start-ups just for the fun of it
Last but not least to volunteer in start-ups, do it for the excitement of trying something new and of the unknown! Student years are the exact years that we have the right to make mistakes, learn from them and do the exact same mistakes all over again just because we can. So why not use this opportunity to do it in the beginning of our career.
Being a volunteer in start-ups is exciting and misterious because you don’t know who you will meet tomorrow or which task you have to complete without sleeping. It will indeed boost your self-trust because you will discover that you can manage crisis and you have the guts to try.
Why wait tomorrow?
