Mind Over Media
Junior Achievement Company Program, VP of Finance
In January of 2026, I joined Junior Achievement’s Company Program, a 16-week program where a team of high school students starts a real company from scratch: assigning roles and positions, raising money from shareholders, building a product, and running the business through to a final sale before winding it down at the end of the season. My team’s starting point was a problem we all recognized: social media and other outside influences were leaving younger people, especially elementary and high school students, less room to build independent, critical thinking skills.
The result was Mind Over Media, a deck of 50 open-ended philosophy prompts with no right answers and no outside influence steering the conversation. I served as Vice President of Finance, building the budget and cost structure, including margins that scaled from roughly 44% to 68% with volume. We priced the deck at $15 against competitors charging $27 to $40, and set aside 10% of every sale for Foundry BC, a nonprofit providing free youth mental health support. The whole project was anchored to two UN Sustainable Development Goals from day one: Good Health & Well-Being, and Quality Education.
We sold through more than half our stock within the first week of production, bringing in over $700 in revenue. We did turn a profit, but the bigger lesson was learning to collaborate with a large team to bring a real, visible product into the world, and learning what it means to take risks and work hard for it: we each put in over $100 of our own money just to get the product made.
“We each put in over $100 of our own money just to get the product made.”
The project later let me apply for Junior Achievement’s Auditory and Presentation Skills Award, where I won a $2,500 scholarship award for sharing my experience in the Company Program. (More of that side of things lives in the Speaking world.)
“Would people still act morally if no one was watching?”
“Are we born with a purpose, or is it up to ourselves to find it?”
“Is it worse to do harm or to allow harm?”
“If aliens visited Earth, what would they think is the strangest human behavior?”
“To what extent does admiring or idolizing someone become harmful to ourselves?”