How It Got Started (Pt. 1) – Entrepreneurship as a Lifestyle

I wanted to start my first ever blog post talking a little bit about who I am and how I came to found InternMatch. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland amidst the politically charged atmosphere of the Washington DC area. From a young age my passion was sports, and I played soccer obsessively for many years. In high school my focus shifted to rowing, through which I began the process of learning how to regularly push myself physically and mentally to new limits. Rowing, much like entrepreneurship, now was more than an activity or a job; it was a lifestyle.

Anyway, after high school I traveled to New York City to attend college at Columbia University. No longer rowing, I felt a gaping hole where my sense of personal identity had been  the framework provided by rowing in high school defined my goals, habits, how I spent my time, who I spent my time with, and in essence who I was as a person. With that structure missing, and surrounded by one of the most challenging and exhilarating academic environments in the world, I shifted my attention to my studies. I majored in Political Science with a focus on Political Theory and felt immediately compelled by great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, Rawls and others who struggled to develop and build on different conceptions of social and political justice.

But I have always been restless in a library and, although my academic studies served to develop and satisfy my growing intellectual curiosity, I felt the need to involve myself in something where I would be both constantly active and regularly faced with new challenges. Around the same time, my father and lifelong promoter of social and political progress introduced me to the concept of Social Entrepreneurship. Social Entrepreneurship is a difficult concept to define, but it refers generally to the idea of creating innovative, sustainable, and scalable solutions to specific social problems. A social enterprise can be a non-profit, for-profit, or hybrid of the two models; the common denominator is coming up with innovative ways to spur social impact that can be developed and implemented on a large scale, hopefully leading to systemic change.

With this framework I found a new lifestyle in which I would dedicate my time and energies.