The very best entrepreneurs in the world are those who can convert every-day opportunities into invaluable businesses. But the most elite entrepreneurs are not those who can create multi-billion dollar corporations; they are certainly great, but not nearly as great as the entrepreneurs of everyday life.  
When my family first came to America from Viet Nam eleven years ago, we had little but a few changes of clothing and less than 2000 dollars. We were average by Vietnamese standards, we were flat broke by American’s. For the first year or so, we lived with my grandpa who provided us board, but my dad had to work three jobs a day to fund my mom through school. My family was not uneducated, in fact, my dad had a degree in both Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and my mom was a doctor in Viet Nam, however, those degrees weren’t accepted in America, so they both had to start over.
My dad struggled. Money was hard to come by, and opportunities to make more money were even more scarce. No company paid attention to an aging, non degree computer programmer with a foreign Mechanical degree and a bad accent. It did not matter that he had more experience than most of their workforce put together; he simply couldn’t get in the door. Until one day, a friend of a friend offered him a chance.

“Our company is in need of a few computer programmers, I hear you’ve got a lot of experience, why don’t you type up a resume and give it a chance.”

This “friend of a friend” was an employee of Dell, but for my dad, he might as well have been an employee of heaven. The resume was quickly written and sent on its way. As quickly as it was sent, it was rejected.

“Thank you for your application, however, we are not currently hiring, please try again at another time.”

My dad stared motionless at the letter for 30 long minutes.

            “Do you know why I was rejected son?” he finally asked.

I tried unsuccessfully to put in the same amount of thought that he did in asking the question, “because you’re not good enough?”

            “No, because I am not writing the resume correctly.”

            “You mean you’re going to lie on your resume?” I asked with trepidation.

“No, I’m going to rephrase it. You see, for a company the size of Dell, there has to be literally thousands of resumes sent in everyday from thousands of applicants. How do you think they sort through all those resumes?”

Again I tried to come up with a thoughtful answer, “they would have to hire a lot of interviewers.”

”No, they would have to use a computer program that can sort through all those resumes, isolating only the ones worthy of an interview. If we can figure out what criteria the computer program uses to judge a resume, then we can beat the system.”

It was a novel concept, certainly not the type of thing you would consider when
writing a resume. But it made sense. So my dad went back and looked at the job application. He took important words and phrases from the application and repeated them dozens of times on his resume: “Oracle”,”database”,”component”, “Visual Basic”,”leadership”,“object oriented”,”project”,”saving”, “Five years experience”  over and over and over again, like an avid gamer going for the highest score.
He sent in the resume again and got an interview a week later.
Dell didn’t offer him a six-figure salary, but they did offer him a job, and it was more than enough to get my mom through her medical program and for us to live comfortably.
What he did will never be recognized in any textbook, or land him millions of dollars, or put his face on TV, but to me, it was the highest level of entrepreneurialship. He succeeded in the most important business of all with the most at stake, the business of providing for his family.  It is not hard to be an entrepreneur when the only thing on the line is your well-being; it is infinitely harder to be an entrepreneur when not only you, but your family depends on your success.
Coming from his background, he knew how machines function, and more importantly, he knew how they function in a corporation. He used his knowledge to overcome an obstacle most others would simply consider as an opportunity lost. It was the first time in my life that I realized the true scope of engineering. It is not just a class, or a subject, or an area of expertise.
It is a way of thinking.
It molds you, challenges you, make you do things you never tried before. Most importantly, it makes you a problem-solver. In no other specialty are there more problems encountered and solved than in engineering. It does not matter if you are overcoming temperature limitations of superconductors in EE, reducing wind effects of skyscrapers in ME, or improving vascularization of synthetic scaffolds in BME, your mind is conditioned to overcome these problems. What I did not realize until that moment was that problems don’t contain themselves to just textbooks in classrooms, they are everywhere in life. And for the mind of an engineer developed to solve problems, it doesn’t matter if the problem is in a classroom or in life, it will be recognized, formulated, and will eventually get solved. 

DAT LE
Austin, Spring 2006