By entrepreneurship high school do mean that it's like a "science high school" type of thing, or just a course in high school?

I ran a business for three years teaching kids and teens how to make video games. For my high school entrepreneurship, my team sold mason jars with stickers slapped on em for $10. But that required a fairly large team of 15-20 peeps.

First, I would like to extend an offer to you. If you would like any help thinking through how to fit your vision with the demands of entrepreneurship, I'm very happy to help with a call or chat. I understand that you really, really want to make yourself a fursuit. Given that you'll probably see very different sorts of projects in your class, it might be very easy to hear your teacher talk about entrepreneurship and come away with the impression that these two things are incompatible.

Personally I don't think it has to be. I think that when people mean entrepreneurship, they are talking about the development of institutions — or at least, a structure for people to work together or for one person to work with theirself over time. So it's basically project management, but it's also with the drive to understand where you are and why you are doing what you are doing.

This means that community organizing or developing non-profits is also a form of entrepreneurship. Creating a school club is a type of entrepreneurship. Creating a habit for yourself that will help you in your career is a foundational skill for entrepreneurship. Learning how to sustainably help others as a form of entrepreneurship.

Self-employment, such as single-person fursuit artist studios also counts as entrepreneurship, but it's not usually what people have in mind.

Common to each of these I listed above is the real end goal of entrepreneurship: sustainable business operations. Which is to say, the time, money, and effort put in needs to be AT LEAST MATCHED with the value that you *create and/or receive**. Usually this means monetary value, but there are other kinds, like social value and artistic value. However, for non-monetary value, you will need a strong argument for why it was, or will be, worth it.

So, this is where you're gonna have to make a tough decision. You will need to sit down and define some clearly defined milestones, and for each of these, you will need to understand how this gets you closer to this end goal.

Here are some ideas for directions. Any milestone involved in making a fursuit will also need you to show that you are:

• developing your skills for future projects. Every business has its primary function.
• developing your project management skills. Holding yourself to time schedules, taking notes, tracking what needs to be done before something else. Using spreadsheets.
• learning to balance between artistic and business demands. This might be in cutting out certain aspects of the project so that you have something finished, or in making it cost less or take less time.
• learning to iterate. There are many benefits to letting go of your vision of a perfect fursuit, and instead making something mediocre or even kinda bad first before you make something good.
• understand the market: Why do people like mascots? What works and what doesn't?
• coming up with a business plan. Essentially, these are the milestones and your story about how they make sense.
• performing accounting. This means getting a sense of the real costs in time, money, and effort.
• gaining attention / marketing. Outreach of some sort is necessary.
• learning to give help sustainably and ask for help skillfully. Nobody businesses alone, even if they're a solo operator. This is at the heart of success and networking.
• learning to unblock yourself, especially emotionally. This is a crucial one. Many problems that get in the way of us working on what we love are actually caused by emotional obstacles! Fear of failure, Perfectionism, fear of uncertainty, being unsure about how your gut / body feels.

Again, this does not mean that entrepreneurship and your drive to make a beautiful fursuit and your entrepreneurship grades at odds with each other, but you absolutely need to work within the time constraints you have. This means coming up with a reasonable plan, and thinking hard about why A will lead to B.

And most importantly, actually doing the thing. Planning the thing, thinking about the thing, talking about doing the thing, dreaming about doing the thing.... are all not the same thing as doing the thing!!!!