Dorm-room business can launch career

Kelly Nyman spent the last semester of her senior year at Washington University in St. Louis cooking up good grades, cheesecakes, blondies, and zucchini bread in her off-campus apartment. But the desserts were not meant to satisfy her sweet tooth -- they were for Kelly's Creations, the baking business she created to "make a hobby into something profitable," she says.

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While the income wasn't always steady, she made hundreds of dollars around holidays such as Valentine's Day. "After seeing real companies sell stuff that I could make, I got inspired." She obtained a list of addresses of her sorority sisters' parents and started sending out flyers explaining her services. Her signature gift baskets, which included a variety of sweets wrapped in cellophane with a bow and personalized tag, were a big hit. "It wasn't big money but it did give me some extra spending cash," she says.

Many students are catching the entrepreneurial bug. Just look at Mark Zuckerberg. He's the 21-year-old Harvard student who created The Facebook, an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. The site has attracted more than two million registered users at about 800 campuses since its launch in February 2004. While Zuckerberg will not disclose the company's earnings, he says it is profitable. It must be successful, otherwise Jim Breyer, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capitalists, wouldn't have invested $13 million in the company.

Of course, there are some very well-known businesses that were started from student dorm rooms, such as Microsoft, Dell, Napster, Netscape, FedEx, and Apple. While it is hard to determine how many student entrepreneurs actually exist, "several surveys indicate that 50 to 70 percent of students hope to one day own their own business," says Gerald Hills, founder of The Collegiate Entrepreneurial Organization (CEO), an entrepreneurship network serving more than 500 colleges and universities that hosts an annual conference for student entrepreneurs.

He says many factors are driving this explosion of interest in entrepreneurship. One reason is that students today don't feel the same sense of job security as they did even a decade ago, he says. "They'd rather chart their own destinies despite the risks involved."

And the risks are often plentiful. Starting a business can be expensive. "A student must ask, 'Is this a viable enterprise?'" says Deborah Chereck, director of career services at University of Oregon. "'Is it going to be more expensive to start it up than sustain it?'"

Hills says it's important to make a habit of saving money. "Save as much as you can early on because the majority of businesses require an investment of the entrepreneur before others are willing to commit to funding," he says.

Fortunately for students, they often have much less to lose than adult entrepreneurs. "In some ways they are better off because they haven't yet accumulated assets like a house or have a family to feed," Hills says. Besides, taking risks is an important part of any business. "Successful entrepreneurs take calculated risks -- the key is to have unique knowledge about the customer you are targeting and the industry you are going into," he says.