A new role in business

His keen interest in business and innovation has also seen him take part in many entrepreneurship competitions since his high school days.

In a competition held by Harvard University in 2017, the team Chen was in came up with the idea of establishing a platform through which students can apply for internships offered by local enterprises.

In 2019, when his family relocated to Shanghai, Chen followed up on his passion by pursuing a bachelor's degree in international business at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This move, he adds, has been a life-changing one because of a local entrepreneurship camp he got to attend.

"The competitions in high school offered opportunities that spurred the imagination and allowed me to accumulate entrepreneurial knowledge, but the camp was the real thing-there were real investors looking for real projects," he says.

At the camp, Chen's team of six brainstormed business opportunities and drafted a strategic plan before presenting their ideas to the investors.

"We found that many Shanghai high school students would go abroad for extracurricular research to enhance their academic capabilities and competitiveness, but some research projects lack supervision. As such, we proposed launching an online platform where domestic students can pay to attend high-quality domestic research projects at universities," he explains.

Chen and his teammates eventually attracted 200,000 yuan ($31,404) in investments, which they used to set up Shanghai Zhigu Culture Communication in early 2020. However, the pandemic quickly upended their plans to promote their services.

"It was difficult to approach customers during those first few months, as our team members were based in different countries and the number of students studying overseas plummeted. When the situation got better in China, many platforms offering similar services started emerging and offered stiff competition," says Chen.

The project team was eventually disbanded, with the company now owned by one of the team members. This failure, however, has not diminished Chen's love for doing business.

"When you are an entrepreneur, it's vital that you believe in yourself and ignore the doubts of others. When unsolvable problems occur, you must ensure you are not overly attached to the project and know when to give up," he says.

Chen has since joined entrepreneurship training courses at the university where he shares insights with students from different backgrounds and seeks out new projects.

"Hardship and failure are friends of mine every day as an entrepreneur. Their presence means that there are things to improve," says Chen.

"I cannot run away from obstacles. I need to face them. That's the only way to advance toward my goals."