Fanshawe's Mature Student
- Rashidi Kabamba
- Nov 22, 2023
- 3 min read
"There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
Being a mature student is something that I never expected being a young graduate of high school, but life happened to me and I was derailed from my academic dreams due to my mental health struggles growing up in my early to mid twenties. Now that mental health is becoming a a topic of discussion and the stigma of it has become lessened it makes me realise that being a mature student is not all that bad and your story is important to share in order to motivate, inspire, and help someone get over the hump.
Working with CMHA, the Canadian Mental Health Association has been a joy and phenomenal experience, each week, and every three weeks, I go to get checked on and evaluated for my mental health to make sure that I am stable. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 23 years old, and I went through an uphill battle for three years, before I came back to school again at 26 in order to pursue robotics at Fanshawe College. That didn't necessarily work, so I pivoted and got a microcredential in entrepreneurship from Fanshawe's Leap Junction Summer Business Accelerator for my business RKease Company. It was a music brand where, I would teach companies how to write jingles and perform their own raps to enhance their company culture.
This experience was great because it taught me the fundamentals of how to be an entrepreneur, and how to set up and start a business successfully with sophistication. I even got to attend the GROW Accelerator and got my own feature article by TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario, a non-for profit which primarily helps start-ups that are tech enabled throughout their whole entrepreneurial journey.
Now working with TechAlliance and their advisory board for venture growth is one of the reasons why I pivoted into technology because every time I was at a networking event or speaking to someone who deals with tech startups they would speak on how technology companies are easier to invest in than convential businessess simply because investors are able to get a great ROI because of technology's revenue model. Subscription based revenue models are the foundation of technology revenue so that's what really peaked my interest into going into the technology sector. Not only do I have the ability to be an entrepreneur, create a business model from scratch, know how to leverage advice from mentors, but with being in technology I can help innovate and create a business which can have recurring revenue which can scale over a period of time. The problem with RKease company is that even if I did so many gigs, I was going to have to have transactional sales and the sales cycle would be longer since I was going business to business.
This is why going to Fanshawe College this upcoming winter semester for computer programming will be quintessential because I can leverage all of my entrepreneurial, mental health, and eventually technological experience into a new innovation, product, service, or company within the marketplace to make the world a better place. All of the books we studied from and understandings that I got about entrepreneurship from Leap and Tech Alliance a lot stemmed from technology enabled and based start-ups, so its important to be in this field now and being a mature student will only propel me to do greater things since I know what I want now and I am more mature as a person so success is only eminent. I hope you enjoyed the blog and stay tuned for more soon, cheers! :)
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