Career Exploration

For this assignment, I was tasked with exploring a career in the arts that seemed interesting for me. Immediately, I knew an area of arts I wanted to look at related to entrepreneurship, which led me to the job title: creative entrepreneur. What I found was that anyone can become a creative entrepreneur, with or without extremely formal education in the topic. Of course, a degree doesn't hurt, but for this role, it's not required to succeed. For creative entrepreneurs, each day can look incredibly different, especially when looking at the actual work each person does. Creative entrepreneurship can involve running the business side of things; handling finances, packing orders, etc., but that all comes down to what the product is. A day can be filled with painting, drawing, sculpting, and creating, but as an entrepreneur, each product is for a market, so everyone in this role must learn the ins and outs of much more than just the task of creation.

Surprisingly, I found that there are majors that actually hone in on this exact topic, like entrepreneurship in the arts, creative entrepreneurship, and other business-related programs, though most of these were only minors in college, not majors. However, in many arts schools specifically, the business programs present automatically incorporate the arts into the curriculum, helping growing artists to market themselves and learn the financial side of things. In Richmond, VCUArts has quite a few programs for things like this, though programs at SCAD, MICA, MassART elsewhere. Few programs advertise themselves as being specifically for creative entrepreneurship, though any entrepreneurship minors in college can help well-round a student if they are already studying art.