Some are:
Leaving a legacy…
Being their own boss…
Changing the world…
Teaching the next generation of entrepreneurs…
Sharing their knowledge…
Creating something new…
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Profile: Bjoern Weidlich,
Clark Student, '10
FOREIGN AID
 There are always obstacles students face when it comes to starting
businesses, but Clark freshman Bjoern Weidlich is facing a big one: it
may not be legal for him to actually own his own business due to his
international status. However, this issue is not deterring him from
continuing to develop his idea to offer an online foreign language proof
reading service. Weidlich spent his last two years of high school in
Maryland living with an American host family and is fluent in English.
His American friends saw the benefits of having a friend with bilingual
abilities and asked him for help proof reading papers. As he was
continually approached for help, he realized that there was a business
opportunity, and from that
Foreign Aid
was started.
He hopes to have the ability to offer the proof reading services
online soon. Students can go onto a website, submit a foreign language
paper for review by a fellow student fluent in the language and receive
their paper back with the corrections added as comments in a Microsoft
Word document. This will allow the student to see what was changed and
why, as well as give them the ability to accept or reject corrections.
Weidlich emphasized that the service would be correcting language usage
only–not content. He compares it to submitting a rough draft to a peer
for review, before working on the final version for the professor. “I’m
not trying to cheat the professors. We don’t want to write the papers,
but instead help the student learn a foreign language.”
Bjoern, who is from Berlin, Germany, has a student visa to study in
the U.S., but not work here. He said that it has been “discouraging to
run into these bureaucracy issues, but I am learning a lot.” He is
currently working with a variety of resources, including
Initial Advantage, the Clark Office of Intercultural Affairs, and is
looking into the option of consulting an immigration lawyer. He is
considering having Initial Advantage run the business since they
currently have the ability and will soon be a non-profit organization.
He is most interested in seeing if he can grow this idea and create a
viable service out of it, even if he doesn’t make a profit. “I don’t
plan on it being a huge money maker originally. It’s just an idea I had.
I want to see where I can go with it.”
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