I started studying in 2023 and since then I have continuously taken opportunities to gain more practical business experience.

My first experience of entrepreneurship was as part of my foundation year where we had to create a business and write a business plan for it. I was the managing director and conducted all the social media marketing for the business, which was a great experience. Continuing my studies on my Business Management with Entrepreneurship and Innovation BSc has helped me learn new things about entrepreneurship and provided me with a broader perspective of the business world as a whole – it’s been great to apply my learnings.

The Hatchery

I then joined The Hatchery, which is a student business incubator aiding entrepreneurial-thinking individuals in turning their ideas into a reality. This provided me with an avenue for exploring my idea of creating a digital marketing company. I had previous experience with this by working on the social media of non-profit organisations as well as being the Social Media Manager for the Scuba Diving Society and the university. From this I discovered that I really enjoyed producing content for organizations and wanted to do it professionally. Learning that there were like-minded people out there was a great discovery and led me to co-found Aurelia Marketing with Victoria Angell-Sanchez.

Being a participant and a student founding team member of the Hatchery has been a great experience and has provided me with the tools and guidance to make Aurelia Marketing a reality. Being able to hear about the concepts we learn during my degree in a more practical sense is really useful and has even aided my degree! I have been able to grow my confidence which has allowed me to do more public speaking and increase my network. Each week we have a new workshop which looks at a specific concept at a highly detailed level and helps us to understand how it could affect us.

Practical Experience

Starting up a limited company involves a lot of learning to truly understand the different responsibilities you have compared to being a sole trader. We found this very daunting as even though we had learnt these concepts in theory, we found that it was completely different in the real world. Having meetings with some of the founders that are a part of the Hatchery and been there before was really useful as they gave us great advice to make this process easier for us. We are still constantly learning new things about business and entrepreneurship and having this practical experience alongside our degrees has been really beneficial. For this reason, we are very glad that we took the leap of faith and kept going despite any problems we faced.

Work/study balance

If there was one piece of advice I was going to pass on, it would be the importance of balance. Trying to start-up your own enterprise while also balancing the demands of your degree is very difficult. There have been many times it has felt overwhelming and impossible to pull off, but the key thing is to keep persevering. By expanding our team beyond just Victoria and myself, we were able to ensure that everything in the company was running smoothly, and we were still able to produce high-quality work for our clients without compromising our academic performance.

It is also essential to realise that you can’t do everything; we have had to evaluate what we put our time into and focus on the things that are most important to us. Sometimes it does feel like I have many full time jobs that I balance each day, but the best thing to do is asking for help when you can and take time to yourself when you need it. This is a key advantage of having a co-founder instead of doing it on your own- we make sure to share the load between us and if one of our schedules is too busy, the other picks up the slack and vice versa.

Now Aurelia Marketing continues to grow and develop with 6 of us working to produce bespoke, authentic non-ai social media marketing and branding. I hope that this will help other students realise that it is possible to achieve while at university and is probably the best time to do so due to having so much support!

Thanks for reading.

– Emily