Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

From wanting to be an entrepreneur to wanting to help entrepreneurs win

Since this is my first blog, I’ll introduce myself by explaining how I struggled to find the internship I’m working on this summer.

I’m Moise Harari and since a young age, I’ve been eager to start my own company. I was disappointed to realize that, generally, in the U.S it is not legal to do so for an international student. I knew I was going to figure out a way around this issue in the future, but I realized that if I wanted to start working and gaining curriculum, I would have to start searching for an actual job. So in November 2017, I started searching for an internship.

Since then, I attended all the networking events and opportunities to meet companies that I heard of. I was happy to get lots of business cards and a couple of interview opportunities. I attended the Career Center regularly, I emailed around 15-20 employers, I sent numerous copies of my resume and cover letters to companies, and I was interviewed 3 times. However, not one company seemed interested in me.

Months later, I understood that one of the reasons behind this problem was that I wasn’t truly interested in them either. I was applying for internships for the sake of gaining job experience, but not because the companies that I chose truly interested me. Deep down, I didn’t want to be going through the job search process. All that I wanted was to be involved in entrepreneurship.

On April 2018, just as I was struggling with this idea in my head and was about to give up on the job search for this summer, I happened to go to the offices of MassChallenge thanks to the Israel Trek organized by the CCD. The core principle at their office is “Helping entrepreneurs win”. They were a startup accelerator that doesn’t take any equity from the companies that seek help from them. I thought to myself: “this is the place where I want to work this summer”.

The following weeks I emailed everyone that I could from the company and called everyone on the company who possibly had a connection to Babson or to people that I knew. I applied for 2 internships in the company by sending my cover letter and my resume.

After a couple of months, the Startup Services Manager from MassChallenge (Ross Palley) emailed me with an invitation to chat further about my application. After being interviewed by him for about 30 minutes, he offered me the job of Startup Services Intern.

This experience not only gave me a glimpse of how tough the job search process can be, but also an insight into how there’s more than one way to achieve my career development goals. I thought the only way to have an entrepreneurial experience was by becoming an entrepreneur, but MassChallenge gave me a chance to have this experience by helping 128 other entrepreneurs win.