The next money-making Internet startup is coming from a group of Brooklyn Technical High School students.
Five seniors at the famed Fort Greene school are starting a website, www.myCollegeSTAT.com, which will offer helpful tips for high school students trying to gain admission to their dream universities.
The site will be in the same vein as Wikipedia and Facebook, which allow Web users to log on and post information.
For www.myCollegeSTAT.com, which is currently under construction, college students will post details about which extracurricular activities and high school classes are most desirable to universities.
“It provides students with access to this information – AP [Advanced Placement] tests, extra curricular [activities], jobs held, awards won,” explained Awad Sayeed, one of the students.
For the website, Sayeed and his partners – Kyle Wong, Izra Izrailov, Francesco Nuccio, and Charles Naut – created a marketing strategy and business and financial plans.
They did it all as preparation for the first Junior Achievement of New York (JANY) Business Plan Competition sponsored by G.C. Andersen Partners.
And get this – they won!
Their first place prize is $3,000 each in college scholarships.
But they may have won an even bigger prize.
The judges of the competition – corporate honchos – seemed interested in supporting the Web site.
“We exchanged some contact information with some of the judges,” Wong said.
“They liked it and we’ll see where it goes,” Sayeed said.
In the meantime, the 12th-graders are spreading the business spirit to their classmates at Brooklyn Tech, which is located at 29 Ft. Greene Place.
They’ve already founded the Young Entrepreneurs Associ-ation and “the attitude of the founding members is really spreading through Brooklyn Tech,” Nuccio said.
That “attitude” includes a focus on teamwork.
“There were times we found ourselves in a disagreement but we just reasoned it out,” Naut said. “We have worked together for two years so we know each other’s personalities. We always decided as a team what was best for the company.”
Vieng Vongnarath of HSBC spent 10 weeks working with the students to ready their business plan for the competition.
“I’m very proud of them,” she said. “The reason why I think they won this is they’re not afraid to ask for feedback. How we criticize them – they take that into consideration and they redo their plan. They reevaluate it and make it better. They’re young successful entrepreneurs.”
“I think we’ve taken real-world experience from this competition,” Izrailov said. “The entrepreneurial skills we gained from putting together this business plan all the way to the presentation will stick with us down the road.”
