Student Perspective: Ashley Einspahr

Presenting at the Nebraska Entrepreneurship Best Practices Summit was quite a learning experience for me. I am Ashley Einspahr, a Junior at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, studying Organizational and Relational Communications with a minor in Entrepreneurship. I was fortunate enough to be asked to present at the Nebraska Entrepreneurship Best Practices Summit on the topic of Retaining Emerging Talent in Nebraska. This opportunity provided me with some experience talking in front of an audience. It also provided me with some insight researching this topic to further my own understanding why people my age leave Nebraska or decide to stay in Nebraska. Nonetheless our presentation was a precise way to say what keeps people in Nebraska.

Our group on campus, the Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization, helps college students find the resources that they need to satisfy their wants and needs out of a community and job so that way they know they can stay in a small community but do what they want for a job. We implement creative thinking of the entrepreneur by doing events for high school students and other projects. Some of them are New Venture Adventure, Adulting 101, Brewed Awakening, and New Venture Adventure on the Road. Once we did our presentation on how we try to keep students in Nebraska, we opened up for questions. This was probably the best part to presenting because the audience could specifically ask whatever questions that they wanted. Some of the questions were “how do we get more people interested in manufacturing and working in the manufacturing world?” Or “how do we know that our projects are keeping students in Nebraska?”

Being able to be of my generation and talk with people who are older than me to actually want my opinions on things that impact students, Nebraska Entrepreneurs, and Nebraska as a whole made the whole presentation worth getting up early for. I learned that our opinions may be small to some people but the difference makers take other views from different people based on age, gender, education, etc and those are the real difference makers in Nebraska and in the entrepreneur field.