Simon Wang
Simon Wang, Ohio University’s 2018 Charles J. Ping International Leadership Award recipient, doesn’t just find a way—he forges a solution.
Arriving in the United States with his mother, he was an entrepreneur by third grade. Unable to communicate with his father, still in Taiwan, he enrolled in Chinese courses as soon as he arrived at OHIO.
International Student and Faculty Services created the Charles J. Ping International Student Leadership Award in 2010 to recognize outstanding leadership by an international student. The award is named for President Emeritus Charles J. Ping, president of Ohio University from 1975-1994, to honor his support for international education and exchange. His leadership resulted in the expansion of international education at Ohio University.
Wang is a sophomore in OHIO’s Honors Tutorial College, studying business and entrepreneurship.
With fellow HTC student and entrepreneur Evan Berryman, Wang was recently profiled by Alibaba in a story headlined “Paying for University with e-Commerce.” The two recently returned from a trip to China to oversee their suppliers.
It’s an understatement to say Simon Wang had a hard landing in the United States. Born the youngest of four children in Taiwan, he and his mother moved alone to Virginia when he was just six. His earliest memory of the United States is not being allowed through the airport because his mom didn’t know what to say in English. He struggled to integrate, not knowing simple things that local kids knew—like that yellow buses took kids to school. They were poor, too, which meant Simon wore ill-fitting clothes and was teased by his classmates. He admits that there were days he went home crying from school.
His escape from a difficult childhood took an unusual form: e-commerce. In the third grade, Simon started selling basketball shoes on eBay. He’d buy used Air Jordans from his classmates for $5 at the end of a basketball season and flip them online.
“For me, that was the greatest thing. I’d essentially work for one hour, make a nice listing, then make $50-100 per flip,” he laughs.
…Between his e-commerce platforms and a few part-time jobs, he was able to pay for university—one of only six students from his graduating high-school class to go into secondary education. “I know my mom couldn’t support me. She’d already done enough in paying for our house, so I had to take care of my own schooling.”
Now, Simon, who’s just turned 20, is a sophomore in Ohio University’s Honors Tutorial College, studying business and entrepreneurship. During his freshman year, he had an orientation interview with Evan Berryman, now 21 and a junior in the same program. Evan admits that his path to OU was a lot easier (both of his parents are faculty), but they quickly bonded and started a business together.
That venture is only a few months old now, but running it has been a crash course in business.
“For us it’s been about the process of converting people and having them believe in what we’re selling,” explains Evan. “You have all of the predispositions to what’s going on when you buy internationally. The more you do it and the more that you see, the better idea you have about how the sourcing process works. Alibaba is as good a picture as you can paint of what happens without going to see it yourself.”
But they went and saw it themselves anyway. In November, the two took a trip to China to meet their suppliers and to check on some of their products in person. Their main product now is sensory toys—squishies and fidget spinners—but the first round they ordered didn’t meet their expectations. (Though they admit, in retrospect, to not knowing how to clearly outline their requirements for the supplier.) So they wanted to come and see the factory in person and work out some finer point.
From left, Evan Berryman, Simon Wang, and Xuan Vo Phan Nguyen
Missing His Father
Growing up, Wang was able to address his financial challenges through his business acumen, but he was still bothered by the problem that troubled him most—being unable to properly communicate with his father. So upon entering OHIO, Wang enrolled in the Chinese program (Mandarin) in the Linguistics Department. After one year of Elementary Chinese, he found he was able to communicate fairly well with his father, so he began conversing with him a little bit every day using social media.
This daily practice did wonders for Wang’s Chinese ability and helped him to become closer to his dad. Wang’s father was so pleased by the development of his son’s Chinese ability and the university that helped him do this that he recently wrote an open letter in his Facebook page thanking Ohio University and the Chinese program.
Expanding His Business
Learning Chinese also brought Wang more career opportunities. Twinning his growing Chinese abilities and his business experience and HTC training, Wang worked last summer at a San Francisco based bio-tech start-up called HeartFlow, analyzing 3D heart images. He then interviewed, entirely in Chinese, at the U.S. headquarters of the famous Chinese internet conglomerate, Alibaba, in San Mateo.
His excellent performance led the company to offer him an internship position, only to find out that according to company policy, he was too young to actually be hired. However, this did not deter Wang’s quest for professional opportunities using his Chinese. Last November, he went to China over Thanksgiving break, interviewed at the World Headquarters of Alibaba with some success, but eventually landed a finance internship at Verifone Inc. in Shanghai, China for the summer of 2018.
This spring Wang is interning in Findlay, Ohio, at Marathon Petroleum headquarters to learn the IT infrastructure side of this industry. His American upbringing and Chinese ability, Wang says, separated him from the rest of the candidates he was competing against.
Wang is highly self-disciplined in both his study and his daily routine. He might be up at before dawn doing school work and working out at Ping. He says that his self-discipline comes from his goal of bringing the rest of his family into the United States someday.
“Compared to the rest of the world, the United States truly is the land of opportunities if you are willing to put the work in,” he says.
Comments