By KIRSTY CHAN
Students are changing the workforce with entrepreneurial endeavours that range from working for a cartoon porn website to wellness-centric businesses.
Popular sugar baby website Seeking Arrangement showed just how eager university students are to make their own money, with recent statistics indicating Monash University has the most sugar babies of any university in Australia in 2019.
But students are also finding lots of more challenging and interesting ways to make money.
University of Queensland student Lilac Kapul has found financially stability in a not-so-conventional gig, working for a small company that creates hentai – anime or manga-based porn.
Ms Kapul actually works as a software engineer and is part of the core staff team handling network security for clients. She helps to program and design software for the company but also handles tasks such as recruitment.
She started out working on freelance projects with the company in 2014 and the collaboration continued naturally after.
Ms Kapul said her work was “very interesting”, but sometimes involved “dramatic publicity”. She was drawn into a verbal and legal brawl when she publicly challenged technical comments made on a white supremacist website that her company hosts.
“There were comments about wanting my head and wanting to file a lawsuit against me,” she said.
Fashion is another field that has proven lucrative for some, including Swinburne University student Nicole Ng.
Her business The Good Shit is an online boutique that aims to deliver fast fashion at affordable prices for consumers.
Ms Ng said she got the idea of starting her own business after getting frustrated looking for cafe jobs.
“I decided I would rather do something of my own, and be able to build on it, rather than work for someone,” Ms Ng said.
“As a student, I have minimal financial responsibilities, so I feel it’s the best time to explore. Also, because I don’t have a full-time job, so I have more time to work on this.”
Ms Ng said she spent “three to four hours a day” working on setting up her website, apart from having classes and working on her assignments.
“It’s pretty much all I do on weekdays,” she said.
“I wanted to start this online store for people like me, who love shopping online but do not want to pay exorbitant prices." The fast fashion big brands set high profit margins and weren't necessarily worth it, she said.
Fellow Swinburne student Melissa Daisley has pursued an entrepreneurial path while at university, working as a brand strategist for products in the wellness industry.
Ms Daisley started off as a brand strategist when she left the design industry to study Chinese Medicine and met students who had products with no brands or marketing and decided to help them.
She would consult with the clients to understand their product before developing a visual language for the brand.
Ms Daisley said seeing her clients succeed and helping them achieve their aims had been worthwhile.
“It’s definitely difficult but it’s also been very rewarding,” Ms Daisley said.
“Professors and classmates think it’s great I’m already working in industry.”
A 2012 survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed almost 50 per cent of students pursuing higher education were studying full-time and working part-time.