Finally, the Obama administration can point to at least 3 jobs created in the alternative energy industry!

On a less ironic note, these three recent graduates can inspire others who are struggling to find jobs to consider the opportunities afforded by starting their own business.

And, it can server as an example of an innovative school that allowed this go-getters to take an entrepreneurship class.

What started as a class project has blossomed into a unique business.

Last fall, while in their senior year at the College of Charleston, Matthew Coda, Jake Cotreau and Taylor Denny happened to be in the same entrepreneurship class with an assignment for different teams to come up with an idea for a new venture.

Denny had an idea. He wanted to start a solar-powered golf cart taxi business on peninsular Charleston.

“I thought this is something no one else has done, and it would help with transportation,” Denny said. If successful, it would be a first in the nation as far as they knew.

After getting to know a little more about Coda and Cotreau, he pitched his concept to them and they teamed up.

The three young men kicked around ideas, sometimes not always the same. Like any business partners starting out, on occasion they butted heads from lighting in the golf carts to the design of business cards, but over several months the sun-fired concept rolled into reality.

“We are all perfectionists in our own sense, but we all came together for the end product,” Coda said.

On June 2, they launched their business, but not under the name – Gold Cart – originally envisioned, and not in downtown Charleston.