By Jordan Bickham
Staff Writer

As the business world continues to evolve, students are looking into learning about business and entrepreneurship in preparation for their future careers.

Seniors Archie Agarwal and Kash Basavaraju founded the Economics Club at Coppell High School just this year.  Their goal for the club is to teach students about the art of economics.  This includes: marketing, finance, accounting and entrepreneurship.  They plan on better understanding these concepts through creating and managing an actual business.

Last year, they were inspired to create this club after setting up an actual business in economics class to donate to Kiva, a company donating to working entrepreneurs around the world.  While they are setting the business up to learn more about economics like their previous experience, the money is going a different cause.

“I was inspired by the business we started in our economics class and I wanted to involve more kids in it on a greater basis, where our focus should not be giving money to a Kiva website, but instead, making it and giving it to a good cause,” Agarwal said.

While what the funds go to is a huge aspect of the club, the club is mainly focusing on setting up a business in order to have a hands-on experience learning important economic concepts as well as tutoring AP economics students.

“[Archie and I] both love economics, just the logic and rationale behind it, how people interact with each other, how society works, at least how it should work,” Basavaraju said.  “This inspired us to take initiative, get people to know about economics a little more and to start up our own business.”

But before they could start thinking about profit and learning, they had to first think about the actual product for the business.  Since it is the beginning of football season, they decided to aim their product at football fans to make an easy profit.  Although the club is still very new, they have made a considerable amount of headway, already thinking up some product ideas such as clappers, T-shirts and more.  While they have not finalized a product just yet, they still have plenty of time and many ideas to choose from.

“For the first semester, our main focus is the football games; we are definitely going to want something that will be desired by the fans of the Coppell student section,” Agarwal said.  “But our second semester, we are going to try to focus on other activities around school or maybe just something the seniors will be interested in taking as a souvenir from their high school.”

While the club seems difficult enough with the goal of creating a business, the club itself was difficult to create.

“We first had to set some guidelines and create certain objectives and goals.  Once we had that sort of laid out, in some shape or form, we were able to start publicizing it,” Basavaraju said.  “That is why we started the Facebook group and added 50 people, and we actually got some pretty good feedback.”

But a CHS club is not complete without fitting into the school’s guidelines for clubs, which includes having a teacher sponsor.  For the economics club, chemistry teacher Bob White decided to help support the club and guide the students. White decided to sponsor the club after Agarwal, who took chemistry from White his sophomore year, asked him to help out.

“Archie made two or three attempts to talk me into being the sponsor; economics is not my thing, and I wondered what I could really add to their activities and their projects,” White said.

Even though White has a limited economics background, he decided to sponsor the club after seeing Agarwal’s persistence and dedication to getting it started.  Now, as the sponsor, White is already impressed with how the club is going and where it is headed.

“They have just started, but they seem to be enthusiastic.  They seem to be committed,” White said.  “And I think, based on what I have seen so far, that they will learn some important lessons about being entrepreneurs and having, at least, a small-scale business to initiate and manage.”

With a full year ahead of them, the economics club has a lot to do and a lot to learn, but with their dedication and drive, the profit is promising.

“My goal is to make this a big enough club to where people are interested in joining it for next year because it is not only a good thing to put on an application, but it is also just a fun thing to do,” Agarwal said.