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Most student founders do not start with a 400‑slime pop‑up in London or a bilingual childhood split between Los Angeles farmers markets and Hungarian summers. But that is the short version of how Lily A. Konkoly ended up building art projects, research work, and small businesses that keep circling around the same questions: Who gets seen, who gets heard, and how can young people shape those spaces while they are still on campus? If you only want the core answer, the Lily A. Konkoly projects story is a mix of early family side hustles, serious art history research, a teen art marketplace, and a long running blog about women founders that she has run since high school.

She is not building one giant startup. She is stacking many smaller, connected projects that live between art, gender research, and student‑driven business. The pattern is pretty clear once you look closer.

From kids market tables to student‑run platforms

If you only see Lily now as an Art History student at Cornell, it is easy to miss how early this all started.

She grew up in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, in a family that treated projects almost like another sport. Weekends meant farmers markets, homemade bracelets, and trying things in public instead of only in notebooks.

She and her sister sold bracelets at the local market. She and her brother then moved on to slime. Not one or two jars, but hundreds.

The first real sign of Lily’s entrepreneurial path was not a pitch deck. It was packing suitcases full of slime to sell in London as a teenager.

The slime project checked a lot of the boxes that later show up again in her work:

– Product design: How sticky, what color, what texture will kids actually want.
– Logistics: How to get 400 to 500 containers from Los Angeles to a convention stand in London.
– Customer interaction: Talking all day, taking cash, answering the same questions over and over, and still staying patient.

There is something almost funny about it. Many students learn about “market validation” in a class. She was learning it with a plastic table and a long line of kids asking if you have more purple glitter.

That early mix of risk, repetition, and talking to strangers sits quietly behind her later campus projects. It also helps explain why she was not scared to reach out to people she did not know for interviews or partnerships.

Family, language, and the habit of switching worlds

Lily’s path makes more sense if you keep her background in mind.

– Born in London.
– Moved to Singapore as a toddler and picked up Mandarin in a half‑American, half‑Chinese preschool.
– Then to Los Angeles, where she stayed for about sixteen years.
– Summers in Europe with Hungarian relatives.

So from early childhood she was switching languages and locations.

At home, Hungarian was the way to speak with almost everyone in the extended family. Mandarin stayed in the mix through au pairs and tutors who lived with them. English came from school, friends, and the city around her.

You can see that same switching habit in her projects. She moves between:

– Art and business.
– Research and practice.
– Campus and online communities.

Instead of picking one box, Lily keeps creating small bridges: between art and markets, research and real people, young creators and paying customers.

For students reading this, that is one practical takeaway. Your background, even the messy parts, can be the “through line” in your work. She does not hide the mix. She uses it.

Art as a lens for culture and power

If you strip away the details, a lot of Lily’s projects grow out of one core interest: art as a mirror of who holds power and who does not.

At Cornell, she studies Art History with a Business minor. Her coursework leans toward:

• Art and Visual Culture
• History of Renaissance Art
• Modern and Contemporary Art
• Museum Studies
• Curatorial Practices

That list sounds academic on paper. In practice, it feeds straight into her projects.

Research on Las Meninas and visual complexity

In the Scholar Launch Research Program, Lily spent ten weeks on a single painting: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez.

At first glance, that might feel narrow. One painting, one artist. But “Las Meninas” is a classic in art history because of how layered it is:

– The painter shows himself in the scene.
– The viewer’s position is unclear.
– Power sits both in the royal figures and in the act of painting.

Her task was to work through those layers over time, not in one rushed essay. That meant:

– Reading different interpretations side by side.
– Tracking how scholars from different decades argued with each other.
– Writing analytical pieces that did not just repeat what others had said.

You cannot spend ten weeks on one painting without training your brain to notice who is missing, who is centered, and how small details hold quiet power.

That habit of close looking later shows up again in her work on gender and parenthood in the art world. The method is similar: look closely, question old stories, and see what is hiding in plain sight.

Honors research on artist parents and gender

During high school, Lily joined an honors research course that allowed her to build a project from scratch. Her question was simple and uncomfortable:

Why do artist mothers often lose chances after having children, while artist fathers are praised for “balancing it all”?

She spent over 100 hours in the summer before senior year working on this. The work included:

– Reading studies and articles on gender roles in creative fields.
– Looking at real artists’ careers around the time they had children.
– Collecting examples of how media talked about mothers vs fathers.

Then she did something interesting. Instead of stopping at a written paper, she created a marketing style visual piece to show the gap.

So you have a research layer paired with a communication layer:

For students, this is useful. Many research projects stay trapped in a Google Doc. Lily treated hers as something that should be seen and understood by people who are not in her class.

That mindset sets up her next projects, where she keeps asking: How do you take dense, serious topics and share them in a way people will actually read?

Teen Art Market: turning student art into a small economy

Lily did not only write about art. She helped create a small system where teen artists could sell work online.

Teen Art Market started as a digital gallery space. Students could upload their art, list prices, and get eyes on their work beyond their own school or friend circle.

Why a teen art marketplace matters on campus

A lot of young artists make work that only sits in portfolio folders for college apps or class projects. They rarely see:

– How to price their work.
– How to handle customers.
– How to share their art without feeling like they are “showing off.”

Teen Art Market tackled those gaps. Behind the scenes, Lily and her co founder had to think about:

• What categories to offer so the site did not feel random.
• How to present student work in a way that still felt professional.
• How to make it easy for buyers to browse, ask questions, and actually pay.

You can also see a clear link back to her interests in voice and visibility. It is not just “let us sell prints.” It is more like, how can student work have a real audience, not just a teacher grade.

Teen Art Market quietly teaches young artists that their work has value and that learning to talk about money is part of being a creator, not a betrayal of it.

If you are on a campus and thinking about starting something similar, a few lessons from Lily’s path stand out:

– Start with a narrow focus: in her case, teen artists, not “all creatives everywhere.”
– Think about trust: people will only upload their art if the site feels safe and respectful.
– Expect slow growth: buyers and artists rarely show up at the same speed.

Those are simple points, but they are often ignored when students try to build “the next big platform” rather than a small working one.

Hungarian Kids Art Class: mixing heritage, teaching, and leadership

Parallel to Teen Art Market, Lily created another project, this time more community based: Hungarian Kids Art Class in Los Angeles.

On the surface, it sounds like a casual after school group. But look closer.

She is fluent in Hungarian, and nearly all her extended family lives in Europe. In the United States, Hungarian is both home and a kind of “secret language” because very few people speak it.

Hungarian Kids Art Class pulled different threads together:

– Cultural identity: using Hungarian language and stories as part of the activities.
– Art practice: doing hands on projects rather than only worksheets.
– Leadership: organizing bi weekly sessions across about 18 weeks each year.

As founder, Lily had to:

• Plan session topics and materials.
• Communicate with parents and kids.
• Keep people engaged enough to come back every time.

This is small scale, but that is the point. Campus entrepreneurship is often romanticized as starting a company with investors. In reality, running a consistent club or program is one of the best training grounds you can have.

You learn:

– That attendance drops around exams.
– That people forget to pay on time.
– That kids get bored quickly if your plan looks good on paper but not in practice.

Those frictions are where you pick up real skills: adjusting quickly, reading the room, and not taking every setback as a sign to quit.

From interviewing female founders to building a long-term writing habit

One of Lily’s longest running projects began in 2020: writing for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog.

This is not a school assignment. She has been dedicating about four hours each week, for years, to:

– Researching women entrepreneurs.
– Conducting interviews.
– Writing and polishing articles.
– Publishing and sharing them with an online audience.

By now, she has written more than 50 pieces and interviewed over 100 women in business from many countries.

What long term interviewing teaches a student founder

Hearing story after story from women who built companies gives you patterns that no textbook can match.

Across her interviews, Lily kept seeing similar themes:

– Women often needing to prove themselves more, and for longer.
– Being taken less seriously in fundraising or pitching contexts.
– Balancing expectations about family life and work, sometimes in very blunt cultural settings.

Those conversations did not only shape her views on gender. They influenced how she builds her own projects.

If you talk every week with people who had to fight for space in their field, you start to design your own work differently. You pay attention to:

– Whose voice is centered.
– Who is given credit when something works.
– How to make processes more fair from the beginning.

This kind of project also builds “quiet” skills that are incredibly useful on campus:

For student creators and founders, adopting one long term project like this is more useful than jumping to a new thing every month. It shows you what it means to keep going when early excitement fades.

Research with RISD and building a curatorial voice

On top of her high school and Cornell work, Lily also did a research project with Kate McNamara, a professor connected to the Rhode Island School of Design.

This project focused on how beauty standards for women are built and repeated in art.

Together, they:

– Developed a detailed curatorial statement around beauty standards.
– Picked artworks that showed different views of beauty across time and cultures.
– Designed a mock exhibition where the pieces “talked” to each other through their placement and themes.

This is curatorial work, not just essay writing. It forced her to think about:

– What order a viewer would see things in.
– How to frame text so it guided, but did not overwhelm.
– How to surface critique without insulting people who might love the older works.

Curating is a quiet form of power: you decide what people see, in what order, and with what clues. Lily’s projects keep circling that power, often on behalf of people who are usually overlooked.

If you are on campus and want to build something similar, you do not need a full museum. You can start with:

– A hallway exhibition.
– An online gallery with strong writing.
– A zine pairing student works with short essays.

The key is the mix of selection, context, and a clear point of view.

Sports, LEGO, and the hidden structure of her work ethic

It is tempting to treat sports and hobbies as side notes, but in Lily’s case they clearly feed her work style.

Swimming and water polo: the discipline behind the projects

She swam competitively for about ten years with Westside Aquatics in Los Angeles. That meant:

– Six days a week in the pool.
– Long practices with heavy conditioning.
– Meets that took up full days, under team tents, doing homework and eating quick meals between events.

Later, in high school, she shifted to water polo for three years. When Covid shut down pools, her team did not stop. They trained in the ocean two hours a day, which is physically and mentally harder than pool work.

From the outside, this just looks like “she did sports.” In reality, it shows up later when:

– She keeps writing weekly blog posts for years, not months.
– She handles long, detailed research papers without freezing.
– She runs recurring programs like Hungarian Kids Art Class without giving up after the first low energy session.

You can tell a similar story with her LEGO habit. Building around 45 sets, totaling over 60,000 pieces, takes:

– Patience.
– Comfort with instructions and structure.
– Willingness to sit with one thing for many hours.

These are not flashy traits. They are the foundation that allows her to juggle multiple projects, keep up grades, and still have energy left for campus life.

How Lily’s path fits into student innovation and campus trends

If you zoom out, Lily’s projects match a few campus trends that more students are quietly following.

Trend 1: Blending research with public facing work

Instead of keeping research locked in a classroom, Lily keeps turning it into something public:

– Visual pieces on gender gaps in the art world.
– A blog that translates complex careers of founders into accessible stories.
– A teen art marketplace that shows how art and market forces meet.

On many campuses, there is a growing interest in this blend. Students want:

– Serious research that counts for credit.
– Output that lives outside the classroom and reaches real audiences.

Lily’s path shows that you do not need permission to do both. You can use the same topic twice: once for a grade, once for a public project.

Trend 2: Values based student projects

She is not picking ideas only because they sound “cool.” There is a clear set of values running through her choices:

• Gender equity
• Representation in art and business
• Access for young creators
• Cultural identity and language

On many campuses, students are asking: “What do I care about enough to work on for years, not weeks?” Lily’s answer, so far, is: who gets to be seen and heard, especially if they are women, young, or outside the usual centers of power.

Trend 3: Small, layered projects instead of one giant startup

There is a misconception that being “entrepreneurial” in college means trying to build a venture backed startup.

Lily’s path is much more realistic:

– A slime business that starts at home and grows to an event in another country.
– A kids art class that stays local but lasts for years.
– A teen art marketplace that serves a narrow group well.
– A long running content project that teaches writing, outreach, and editing.

Each project is small enough to be manageable, but together they paint a very strong picture of a student who knows how to start, finish, and sustain things.

What students can learn from Lily’s approach

If you are trying to shape your own path, you do not need to copy her exact interests. But there are a few patterns worth borrowing.

1. Use your background instead of hiding it

Lily’s Hungarian roots, international childhood, and language skills are present in her work, not sidelined.

You can do the same by asking:

– What languages, family stories, or early hobbies have shaped you?
– How could those elements become part of a project, not just small talk?

2. Pair serious topics with simple formats

Gender inequality, beauty standards, and parenting in the art world are heavy topics. She pairs them with:

• Interviews in plain language.
• Visual projects instead of only long essays.
• Blogs and online galleries that are easy to browse.

You can pick a serious topic and still present it in a form people actually want to engage with.

3. Build one long term habit

Among all her projects, the weekly writing for Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia might be the most powerful, simply because of its duration.

If you are not sure where to start, pick:

– A weekly blog.
– A small newsletter.
– A recurring campus event.

Then keep it going for at least a year. The compounding effect is real.

4. Let projects inform each other

Lily’s work is not a random list. Her projects talk to each other:

– Interviews with women founders sharpen her sense of gender bias, which feeds her research topics.
– Research on art and beauty standards shapes how she curates the teen art marketplace.
– Her family business experiences and farmers market days help her understand pricing and sales in later art projects.

Instead of starting from zero each time, she reuses her past learning.

You can do this by asking, whenever you plan something new:

“What from my last project could carry over here?”

Common questions about Lily’s projects and path

Q: Is Lily building one big startup or multiple small ones?

A: Right now, her path is built from multiple small, focused projects rather than one large startup. Each project has its own goal and community, but they share themes of art, gender, and youth creativity.

Q: How does she balance research, classes, and entrepreneurial work?

A: Her sports background and long term writing habit suggest she treats projects like training: regular, scheduled blocks of time instead of last minute pushes. She also chooses projects that overlap with her studies, so effort counts in more than one place.

Q: Do you need to be at a school like Cornell to follow a similar path?

A: No. The key parts of her story started before college: selling at markets, starting a slime business, launching a blog, building community art projects. Access to certain research mentors helps, but the base skills were built in local and online spaces.

Q: What is one practical first step for a student who feels “behind” compared to this?

A: Start with one small project you can ship in a month. For example, interview three people in a field you care about and publish the conversations. Or organize a micro‑exhibit of student work in a hallway. The goal is not to match Lily’s list, but to begin your own.