Students raking in cash while still at university
We go to school for 12 years and work hard so that at the
end of matric we get good enough results so that we can get into university.
Getting into university gives us the opportunity to study towards a career we
are passionate about or a career which we feel will make us the most money and
lead to a comfortable life for us and our extended family in some cases
depending on where we come from. People who go to university and graduate
generally make more money than people with no tertiary education.
Those who do not make it to university go straight into the
job market and gain work experience or open their own businesses all in the
name of making a living and seeking a better life. Those who do not go to
university have a head start when it comes to work experience and earning a
living, but they often have to start from the very bottom (low income) and work
their way up and maybe they may enrol at distance learning institutions to get
some form of qualification so that they can get promotions.
Student run coffee vending machines pic from Unicafe fb page |
Those of us that choose to go to university often do not get
any work experience while we are at university except for the compulsory vac
work that some courses require in order for you to graduate. We just focus on
school and hope that money and wealth are waiting for us after we graduate but
how many of us find jobs after graduation and how many of us find well-paying
jobs straight out of university without any experience?
Let us define what rich is because the definition of rich
varies depending on where you are, someone who is rich in the hood (ekasi) may
not be rich when you compare him/her with someone who lives in Camps Bay or Sandton.
I will define someone who is rich as a person with a networth of over a million
rand. If you make a million a month and spend a million a month you are not
rich just a high income earner because if that million had to stop coming in
next month how much would you have saved up, could you be able to maintain your
lifestyle afterwards and for how long? People get rich by finding ways to make
money, saving that money instead of spending it all and investing some of that
money wisely so that it makes more money for them.
Okay now that I have deviated from my subject matter it’s
time to get back to what I was talking about, as students here in south Africa we
are not really encouraged to find employment or encouraged to be entrepreneurs
but you are more likely to hear advise like focus on your studies etc. If you read
stories about most people who are rich and are entrepreneurs what you will find
common in most of their stories is that they started doing entrepreneurial
things from an early age, they did not just focus on school and hope at the end
they found a nice job that pays well. They always looked for opportunities to
make money, opportunities as in problems they could help solve via
entrepreneurial solutions.
I am going to tell you a story about two UCT students which
I hope will inspire you to look for entrepreneurial opportunities while you are
at varsity so that you can start generating passive income while you are still
studying and when you eventually work you will have more than one stream of
income and one step closer to becoming rich and comfortable.
Shin on the far left, Hardy on the far right |
Mechatronics students Jason Hardy and James Shin from the
University of Cape Town saw a gap on campus for quality but affordable coffee
so they decided to make vending machines that make different variations of
coffee and hot chocolate. They made the coffee vending machines themselves
using resources from South Korea. The coffee vending machines are available
throughout the UCT campus and students can be seen lining up every day between
classes, during lunch, when they are pulling all-nighters the coffee helps keep
them awake and before writing tests. There are tuck-shops on campus which sell
coffee but the coffee from the vending machine tastes great and its only R10
for a large cup, the benefit of the vending machines is that they work after
hours when all the tuckshops have closed and during vacations when there aren’t
that many students around. According to an interview the Unicaf guys had with varsitynewspaper,
the aim of making these vending machines was to provide “a big cup of coffee,
with freshly ground coffee beans” at a student friendly price. The Unicaf guys
did admit that running a coffee vending machine business is time consuming
which is why I guess many students shy away from entrepreneurial endeavours
whilst they are still studying but the benefits are huge. Hardy and Shin are
planning to expand their business throughout UCT and put advertising screens on
machines so that the costs of coffee can be subsidised by the money they make
from advertising and they plan to improve their machines to include more
features.
There are many possibilities for this coffee machine
business, Hardy and Shin are already talking of plans of opening a coffee roastery
in future, this could be the start of a very wealthy future for Shin and Hardy
as they could finish their degrees and work as mechanical engineers which is a
good paying job especially after you have fully qualified and also have another
income stream from the vending machine business and the roastery business if
that is the direction they eventually take. We could all learn a thing or two
from these two guys, they identified and gap in the market, seized it using
knowledge of the degree they were studying for, they did not wait until they
graduated to make money from their studies.
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