Today, we had a group discussion with Farah, who is the founder of the CCCL, and she talked about her own entrepreneurial journey. Throughout that discussion, she talked a lot about challenges and how she overcame them, which really helped when doing our entrepreneurship exercise. We were put into groups and had two students from the local Moroccan university in Rabat with us as well. The task was to create a new business model. Doing this after the talk, I could really understand what Farah was talking about earlier with her journey, and the thing that really stuck with me from Farah was that as long as you have an idea, you can figure the rest out if you really want it. She talked about how a lot of times people have ideas yet they never act on them, and I think that was something that really stuck with me because the students from Morocco talked about how they wished there was affordable housing, but they could not see a way that it could work. This is why, for our business model, we decided to create Scholars House, which was a business model for affordable student housing. It also tied back into how Farah said that sometimes an idea isn’t realistic until you try, like how she wanted to teach Arabic to everyone, not only foreigners, but also Moroccans. At first, people told her it was not a good idea, yet after she persevered through tough times like not giving herself a salary for two years, she was able to gain recognition for her work, and now there are many other places like the CCCL today.

Going into the entrepreneurial exercise, I was not really sure what to expect since we would be working with students from another country. When we first started talking, we had a lot of ideas, and the one that was most similar was housing in Morocco, where students do not have access to dorms unless they have a certain income, and at Pitt, students have the option to live on campus, which is hard to get or go off campus on their own. The main similarity between the two was how expensive and hard to find housing is, which is why we created the idea of Scholars House. After we came up with the idea, which took most of the time because we had a very good conversation about similarities and differences between US and Moroccan universities, we had to finally come up with the business plan. This is where we ran into some challenges, though, because the way things are used and perceived in the US is different in Morocco. So when we had to decide what the solution was, it became a bit difficult. Common things in the US, like having dorms with furniture and communal bathrooms, were not really known here, typically just unfurnished rooms. So we decided to make a business model that was basically how Towers is set up at Pitt, with laundry, dining hall, furnished dorms, and communal bathrooms. After we decided that we had to figure out who could pay for it, and the Moroccan students agreed that, really, the only way was to have the university provide it because otherwise, private companies would still overcharge, and it would not be accessible to everyone. The final step was creating a name that was as basic as Scholars House, but it translated from English to Arabic well because we decided more people would try it if it were in Arabic. All in all, I learned a lot from the exercise and was surprised by how similar university experiences and challenges are for students in the US to those in Morocco.