If you had met me in my first year of university, you would have found a perfectly ordinary student – half-awake in lectures and trying to remember whether I had actually submitted the latest problem set for me the night before, or only dreamed that I did.
Two years later I found myself in the entrepreneurship hub at my university, convinced I was the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. The only thing missing was a turtleneck!
The uni offered handsome grants of up to £3,000 – a princely sum when you are choosing between eating lunch and dinner – and so I turned up to the meeting looking to convey the confident enthusiasm you would expect from a future entrepreneur.
The problem was, a future entrepreneur should also be organised – and I learned in that meeting that applications for the grant had closed months earlier. They would not reopen until the following year – 2026 – and by that time I would no longer even be at the university!
That was the day I discovered that attention to detail is not just an optional life skill. It is vital, especially when you are trying to build a business while also working through a degree in a maths-based subject. It turns out simultaneous equations are easier than simultaneous responsibilities.
The hardest part of starting a company as a student is time. Or rather the lack of it. You cannot spend as long as you want on the business because your degree politely reminds you that it exists. Some evenings I finish a long day of lectures, grab a coffee, and start working from six until eleven, telling myself it is only for today – even though I know I said the same thing yesterday.
Other nights I push through until the early hours, nerding away at a new feature for Bizcardy, telling myself the sunrise is just a suggestion and not a sign to sleep. Running a startup while doing a degree is basically one long attempt to live two full lives at once.
One of the more humbling lessons is just how steep the learning curve is. I am more technical minded, which is a nice way of saying that marketing confused me at first. I could build something, but getting people to understand why it mattered was another challenge entirely.
I leaned heavily on friends who actually knew what they were doing. They saved me hours of confusion and probably prevented me from designing a promotional flyer that only my mum would have understood.
What surprised me most is how generous people are with their time. When they see you building something from scratch, many of them genuinely want to help. It makes the whole experience feel less lonely.
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There is also the strange double life you live. One minute you are pitching an idea or testing a feature, and the next you are in a seminar pretending to understand the proof on the whiteboard. It forces you to grow faster, because the alternative is falling behind on both sides.
I used to think the challenge was coming up with the idea. It turns out the real challenge is everything that happens after. Managing your time. Learning new skills on the fly. Trying not to burn out. And occasionally accepting that you are not the next Silicon Valley prodigy quite yet.
But despite the chaos, there is something deeply addictive about building something at this age. You learn more in a few months of entrepreneurship than you often do in years of lectures.
You learn how much resilience you have. You learn how important small details are. You learn that progress feels slow until suddenly it is not. And you learn that even if you are running on little sleep and instant noodles, there is something exciting about creating something that did not exist before.
If student entrepreneurship teaches you anything, it is that the journey is messy, unpredictable, and occasionally hilarious. But it is also one of the best educations you can give yourself.