Students learn about the business world at Troy Kitchen
Distance learning class from Troy and Scotia-Glenville High School take trip together
TROY, N.Y. >> Students in a distance learning marketing class from Troy High School and Scotia- Glenville High School met up on a class trip at Troy Kitchen.
The class is a college-level course through SUNY Schenectady and bridged together through Neric. The students, who are creating their own marketing project, were able to learn valuable first-hand advice about the business world from Troy Kitchen owner Cory Nelson.
“Inspiration and perspective, that’s something that I wish I got much sooner in life,” Nelson said of what he was attempting to impart upon the students. “I think I had to figure that out on my own and I guess based on the geographic of the neighborhood you grow up in sometimes you don’t have access to that so if I could give even one shred of advice or a piece of inspiration that gives somebody to know that something is possible, something that I didn’t think when I was younger, so inspiration and possibility, I think that would be my
main goal.”
“Don’t be afraid to fail. Anybody’s going to have challenges; any roadblock is just an opportunity in disguise. So I think mistakes, embrace them, assess them and move on. Don’t hold onto it, just figure out how you
can do better,” Nelson added of his advice to students starting of young and wanting to run a business.
Faculty at both local school’s said that the advice that Nelson gave to their students should be beneficial to them.
“I think the benefits of what Cory told them is that you don’t have to be a typical person that’s opening a business because you have the funds or you have the money or the family has a business, pretty much telling these kids it doesn’t matter who you are you can start a business, if you have the dream and the passion to want to start a business that you can do it,” Troy high school teaching assistant Ebi Campbell said of the opportunity. “He did it, he tried to go the college route and sometimes college isn’t for everybody and it gives that one student that’s not looking to go to college and be able to say hey, I can start a business as well.”
“This has been remarkable because we don’t normally get to meet outside of our distance learning classrooms so to have the students meet each other and to have them come here and talk to vendors who are part of the project we’re working on, because they’re all starting restaurants in the marketing class, to meet with Cory, who not only gave us some great insight into the Troy Kitchen but also his ex-
perience on how he got to be who he is today, which I think is very valuable for our students,” Theresa Carr, business teacher at Scotia-Glenville high school, added of the real world experience.
The students also offered how the experience and advice shaped their own ideas and perspective toward what it takes to start and run a successful business.
“Having this experience I liked it because it was described by somebody who’s been there and done it with the failures and the successes,” Troy high school
senior Joseph O’Rourke said of what he took away from the experience. “He described it very well that you will fail and you can’t be deterred from your success even though you might mess up for the first four years of your business, you have to stay strong and look at everything as a positive, like wow, I already got those failures out of the way so I can’t make them again. Through the project I’ve learned the difficulties, how very detailed you have to be,” added O’Rourke, who hopes to major in business administration at either Babson College or Marist College.
“Some things that you just can’t learn in school, that you have to get experienced in order to learn, that’s a big part of it I think,” Scotia- Glenville senior Jason Vanwely said on what he took away from the opportunity. “Starting early so you make mistakes when you’re young so you can be more successful in the future, that was a big part that I took away from that.”
“For the information part of it, that’s what I’m going to school for business so it was pretty huge for me to see what he had to say about starting up and really just going into it full force,” Scotia-Glenville senior Tyler Cannoe, who is looking to study business at Salve Regina, added.