A 32-year-old woman born into an immigrant family and raised by a single mother has now found entrepreneurial success alongside her mother as a small business owner.
Annie, a well-educated woman, didn’t exactly know how it was all going to pan out after graduating from Boston College in 2013, and then receiving a Master’s degree in Education from Johns Hopkins University while teaching students English in inner-city Baltimore, Maryland.
Her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins was free while she taught ESL (English as a Second Language) with the Teach for America program.
She then enrolled at Harvard in 2015 in a one-year Policy and Management program, which allowed her the opportunity to explore entrepreneurial projects while on campus.
Annie was traveling abroad (see photos above), and that is when her mother Sarah called her, with a unique proposal that piqued her interest in entrepreneurship.
The ‘New’ Family Business: Ice Cream Shop
When Annie’s mother called, Annie was backpacking in Southeast Asia.
Sarah presented a business idea to open an ice cream shop that would require help from her daughter for at least a few months to get the business going strong, which surprised Annie.
She said:
“To be honest, at first I was like, ‘Ice cream shop?’ I wasn’t very excited about it, [but] it was never a question of was I going to help her or not, I think that comes from being an only daughter to a single mother in an immigrant family.” -Annie Park (Source: CNBC)
Her mother, an immigrant from Seoul, South Korea, had owned a deli shop in the past, but she was now “bored” in retirement, and had been experimenting with new flavor combinations made from all-natural…
