Note: This article was originally published here by The Huffington Post. BostInnovation.com and The Huffington Post have a content partnership. Chase Garbarino, BostInnovation and Pinyadda founder & CEO, contributes to a weekly column on entrepreneurship for the Huffington Post.

On Christmas Day in 2005, during my junior year of college, my mother gave me a copy of the Small Business Opportunities magazine in my stocking. To this day, I can still remember the headline jumping out at me: “College Student Makes $300,000 In A Month.” After briefly skimming the article about the student setting up an affiliate shopping site, my mind was was made up – I was going to start an internet business.

The stack of resumes and cover letters prepped for internship opportunities at Lehman Brothers, Goldman and other financial companies never ended being mailed. Instead, a friend of mine and I created an internship position on several job recruiting sites calling for the nation’s top collegiate journalists and media makers to join “The New York Times of college publications.” That night, as I went to bed, it hit me like a ton of bricks: Did I seriously just bail out on applying for legitimate internships to start a national collegiate news site with absolutely no technical or media experience?

After several beers, a night of tossing and turning, and 24 hours of avoiding internet access, I finally checked my e-mail. We had received over 100 applications within a day and ended up receiving a total of over 300 by the time the listing expired after three days. The magazine headline that planted the seed for my interest in entrepreneurship quickly faded to the back of my mind. I was hell bent on giving students at the peak of their intellectual curiosity and development, a platform to share their new ideas and beliefs with the world, and CampusWord was born.

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