Everything shifted the night I found the university’s entrepreneurship grants. Three thousand pounds felt like winning the lottery for someone who treats a meal deal like an investment decision. I marched into the office with far too much enthusiasm, only to be told applications had closed months earlier. And they would not reopen until after I had left the university. That was the day I realised attention to detail is not a small skill. It is essential, especially when you are trying to run a business while studying something that already fills your brain.

What people rarely talk about is how lonely the journey can be. There are no lecture slides on how to install a Shopify add-on at one in the morning because your customers need invoices. No seminar titled “How to Fix the Thing That Broke Ten Minutes Ago.” Most of the work happens quietly, long after everyone else has gone to sleep or gone out. It is not sad, but it is a different kind of silence. You become your own tech support, your own manager, and your own cheerleader, often all at once.

Another part no one prepares you for is the fear of judgement. When you spend nine months coding in your room, you cannot help wondering whether anyone else will actually value what you have built. You worry people will not understand it or will dismiss it straight away. It took me a long time to realise that most people are too busy dealing with their own lives to spend time judging mine. Once I stopped imagining criticism around every corner, everything became a lot lighter.

Balancing a degree with a startup is a challenge of its own. Your degree sits quietly in the background, reminding you deadlines still exist. I have walked out of lectures, grabbed a coffee, and worked from six until eleven at night convincing myself it was only for that day. I knew I had said the same thing yesterday. Other nights I stayed awake building features for Bizcardy, telling myself the sunrise was nothing more than a suggestion.

Then there is the learning curve. I have always been more technical minded, which is a polite way of saying marketing confused me at first. I relied on friends who understood it far better than I did. They saved me from making flyers that only my mum would have appreciated. What surprised me most was how willing people are to help when they see you building something from scratch. It makes the journey feel far less lonely.

For all its chaos, student entrepreneurship teaches you more than you expect. You learn resilience. You learn that small details matter. You learn that progress is usually slow until suddenly it isn’t. And you learn that creating something from nothing is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have at this age.

If entrepreneurship teaches you anything, it is that the journey is messy, unpredictable, and sometimes a bit ridiculous. But it is also one of the best educations you will ever give yourself, because it shows you what you can achieve when you decide to try, even before you feel ready.

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