Student Spotlight: Elizabeth Lentz

The mission of the Center for Business as Mission at Dallas Baptist University is to educate and equip current and future business leaders to restore lives through effective engagement in the business marketplaces. This is accomplished by integrating God’s biblical call to mission with His vocational call to business.

Students like Elizabeth Lentz come to DBU to be equipped for their future careers. Elizabeth is a senior from Quincy, Illinois, majoring in entrepreneurship. While at DBU, the combination of classroom instruction with real life experiences has catalyzed her learning. Elizabeth has worked with DBU to serve in prisons through the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. She has also observed The Lion’s Den DFW business plan competition and interned at an organization facilitating micro-loans and micro-businesses in Bangladesh. Most recently, Elizabeth stepped out of her comfort zone to mentor a refugee family that recently relocated to the Dallas area. We are proud to tell her story and the stories of students like her.

Read Elizabeth’s testimony as a BAM student below!

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In what world would an Afghan refugee family and an undergraduate entrepreneurship student from Illinois find laughter and learning over pizza on a weekly basis? But that’s my new normal. Two days a week, I meet with a family of four to help them learn English and navigate the many challenges they face in their new home, America. This was not part of my plan, but it was a problem that needed addressing. I’ve learned that entrepreneurs recognize opportunities and take action, even when that takes them way outside their comfort zones.

Through my classes at DBU, I learned to leverage my experience tutoring and mentoring this Afghan refugee family, to develop a business platform that will provide jobs for refugee women. This allows them the opportunity to build a social network in their new country and provide a safe place for their children to play and grow. I’m considering selling homemade journals and cards put together by refugee women in the DFW area as a new business venture. This would give the women an opportunity to not only have a job, but also to share and be proud of their stories behind them. After receiving the product, the consumer will have blank pages to share their own stories and idea. If we pursue this idea, we will use the philosophy of “start small-fail small” to test, revise and test again until we feel confident that the market exists and that we have a strategy to best capture that market.

What is my advice to other college students? Do the thing you are scared to do. Don’t wait until after you graduate to try new things. You will not only learn so much through the experience, but find so much joy in it as well.