Student entrepreneur starts decorating business to pay tuition

Tinnisha Lewis who hails from Skeldon, Berbice aspires to be a User Experience Designer for software companies but she has turned to event planning as a business to pay her tuition fees.

The 22-year-old owns ‘The Blanket Experience’ and ‘Snap and Go’ which aptly represents her love for designing.

She believes her greatest motivation for juggling an event planning business and studies is the trust shown by her mother who raised her in a single-parent household.

Lewis currently studies Computer Science at the University of Guyana but she is en route to be part of the User Experience Design programme at St Lawrence College in Canada.

She will need CAN$ 44,000 to pay her tuition and cover living costs. The young woman hopes her story of working as a full-time student and businesswoman will inspire other people to go after their dreams.

Lewis said her businesses were opened in February 2021 as a means of providing persons with picnic setups and photo backdrops. The full-time student has always been interested in decorating.

“The initial reason for my business was because I really wanted to work while I was going to school, however, when I applied for jobs, persons would tell me that I am overqualified.

“So, I figured why not start a business seeing that I am a full-time student,” Lewis said.

But Lewis says juggling both school and work has been challenging. She explains that sometimes her work clashes with her exams but she has lecturers who have been understanding.

She said that in achieving her dreams of owning two businesses and pursuing studies that she is passionate about, has proved that if “you are determined, you can achieve”.

Now in her last year of studies at the University of Guyana, Lewis applied to further her studies abroad.

“I saved up all that I had because I figured that applying would be so expensive and I applied but I was getting a little trouble with the university in releasing my transcript and it was literally on the last day at the last hour I got to submit my transcript and then two days later I received an email “congratulations, you got in,” she said.

To pay for her application, Lewis had to work very hard to save enough money and she still has to secure funds to cover her stay and the remainder of her tuition. She is actively reaching out to persons to support her cause. In her requests for support, she explains that her intent is to study and return to Guyana to boost the user experience on websites locally.

Lewis said she will work with companies to make their websites interactive because she said, “I feel like one of the things that we are missing in most of our websites and most of our product listing is the fact that we don’t think about how users are going to interact to it.”

To support Tinnisha’s businesses contact her on 649-0597 or on social media at The Basket Experience or via her email [email protected].