Tony Xu’ 19 Babson College

Major: Finance & Economics

Q: Are you involved in any new extracurricular activities you’ve never done before? What are the cool things you’ve done so far (can be either academic or extracurricular)?

A: I stepped out of my comfort zone and joined a business fraternity, AKPsi. I never imagined I would be a frat boy back in high school, but being a member of a business frat only means that I have a bunch of people who share the same passion as me, and we will help each other out on our way to becoming business leaders.

I started a company with some close friends in the fraternity back in October. It is a text-based learning platform that makes learning as personal and frictionless as possible, one text message at a time. To date, we have earned around $55,000 in net income from subscriptions.

Q: Describe your academic life: is it intense or easygoing? To what extent do you think that Laguna has prepared you for college scholarship?

A: My school is small in size compared to other big universities. There are only around 2,000 undergrads, so in some sense, it feels like another four years of high school. All classes here are teamwork-based, meaning that you have to make friends and be a team player to finish assignments and get good grades. Since I have had a lot of teamwork experience back at Laguna, I feel very comfortable working with other people. Babson is a business school, therefore all the classes here closely follow and adjust to what happens around the world. Work gets especially intense around the company with the stock market turbulence. Recently, the market plunged due to Coronavirus, so all-nighters have been pretty frequent in the past couple of weeks.