This blog series offers a glimpse into reSET’s summer internship program in entrepreneurship. The series captures interns’ experiences, both with reSET’s curriculum and the startups that they are working alongside. Joseph Kitz is attending Northeastern University in Boston, MA.

My name is Joe Kitz, and I am a rising sophomore at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts with a double major in Music and Finance. Ever since I can remember, I have been passionate about entrepreneurship. I have probably watched every Shark Tank episode that exists. And in the past few years, I have come to develop a passion for social wellbeing. But it wasn’t easy to find a place that matched up with my passion for both business and social wellbeing. In the spring semester, I found myself endlessly searching for internships and coming up with dry and passionless internships at large corporations, that is, until I found out about the internship program at reSET. Immediately, I knew this was the one for me. The collaborative, entrepreneurial, and socially conscious environment was exactly what I was looking for.

My work at reSET has certainly fallen in line with not only my passion for social wellbeing and business, but my background as well. I am fascinated by social dynamics, and I also run a landscaping company. So, writing a paper about social connectivity for Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner, and creating a database and rollout plan for Gardens of New York have been excellent fits. Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner is a social entrepreneurship incubator that helps projects/businesses in Hartford come to fruition, and Gardens of New York is an online platform dedicated to raising awareness about the power of urban gardening. Both of these companies allow me to have lots of agency in the aforementioned projects I’m working on, so I feel like I am making a significant impact in their companies and as a result, in the communities they intend to serve.

My own venture that I am working on is called The Money Oyster, which is an app that empowers people to tackle student debt through effective cost-savings measures. The name, The Money Oyster, is metaphorical for helping people unlock (open up) their confidence (the pearl) with money so that they can overcome the dejection that so often accompanies the topic of money and personal finance. Beyond becoming immersed in personal finance, through this venture in collaboration with a partner, I have learned to communicate more clearly and to put more effort into understanding others versus being understood; these skills will serve me well beyond this experience.

I am incredibly grateful for this internship at reSET for not only their focus on entrepreneurship and social well being as a concept, but in line with this, the leaders of the program have given us incredible agency and independence in our work. We are able to choose how much time we dedicate to each of our projects every day, and we are set up in a coworking space which fosters collaboration among the interns and the business that come in and we work with. No other internship will allow you to have this type of freedom to be creative and forge your own path. I feel very fortunate.

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