Are artists entrepreneurs? Laila Alam says: absolutely! The high school student from Rhinebeck, N.Y., U.S., joins us this month on Future of the Business World to express her creative inspiration as an on-campus Essentials of Entrepreneurship program in Philadelphia this summer. Laila Alam is an aspiring artist who also loves business, which provides a great opportunity to talk about how they influence each other. While Laila’s creative spirit makes her a better Let’s jump right in. You’re a high school student in Rhinebeck, New York. I want to start with a big question. What does art mean to you and how does it feed your drive to be entrepreneurial? Laila Alam: So, art is definitely a constant creative outlet in my life. A big stress reliever all the time. Every year my classes change, but every year I still draw in class. It’s also definitely an opportunity to learn and improve. The principles of art can be applied to a lot of real-life things. Like, for example, in art, you make thumbnails. In business, you have sort of an outline at the beginning, and you improve as you go. So, art has fed my entrepreneurial spirit, I suppose for pretty much as far back as I can remember since the [first time] I heard the word, entrepreneur. I started out selling pencils that I had decorated when I was young in elementary school. And I would sell them for like fifty cents to my classmates who didn’t know that they were not worth fifty cents. And when I got a little older, I started making jewelry. I started out selling bottle-cap necklaces, and then I worked my way up. I sold at craft fairs to sterling-silver jewelry. But all the time, everything I was selling was because I loved creating it. I loved making the jewelry. I loved making the decorated pencils. And I wanted to share that with other people. And now that I’m a high schooler, I do some freelance work and some graphic design stuff, all just because I really love art. And it’s really cool to share that with people and of course, to profit a little bit off of it. Wharton Global Youth: What was your favorite pencil design? I need to have an image. Laila: The way I would do it is I would take a paper clip, and then I would scratch in the design. So, I would write someone’s name in a pattern, and then I would color it in with pens. It was pretty advanced for an elementary school student. Now, I would be a little embarrassed about it, but back in third-ish grade, I was very impressed with myself. Wharton Global Youth: It sounds pretty impressive, I have to admit. So, you have your own web comic created via Webtoon Canvas. Tell us more about this expression of your art. What’s the comic about and how often do you create it? Laila: My web comic is called Insatiable Ambition. I know, it’s a very Wow title. I started it in ninth grade. I started planning for it, and then I started actually publishing it, I believe at the beginning of this year. It’s a comic about the college application process and the competitiveness that comes with that. It takes place in a well-off private school where kids are very competitive with each other. There’s a lot of stuff that has to do with social hierarchy and class systems — very different from my rural, small-town high school. I suppose that’s probably what drove me to write about that. I try to update it at least once a month, but with school starting it’s kind of a little bit less than that. But generally, I think that’s what high school students tend to do with Webtoon Canvas — monthly. A lot of high school students publish on Webtoon Canvas. Wharton Global Youth: Interesting. Yeah. I’m sure that topic itself resonates with a lot of high school students everywhere. Do you have an audience? How has it been met? Laila: I was actually really surprised. I thought that no one would take a look at it. But I think I have any somewhere between 200 and 300 subscribers. Which just hearing that number doesn’t sound like a lot. But for me personally, having 200 to 300 people who I’ve never met in my life, actually reading something that I’ve created is insane. It’s just crazy what the internet can do, I suppose. It also helps that I have an Instagram account where I basically just advertise that web comic and that has nearly 2,000 followers. So they go together a little bit. Wharton Global Youth: Your platform and your leveraging of social Source link
