Local students juggle classes, business

Money is not an issue that Chad and Andy Baker need to worry about. \n"Our parents separated when we were young and we never had an abundance of money to play with, so we decided to make our own," Andy said, as he lounged in his three-bedroom apartment, which the two bought and renovated.\nChad and Andy are two of the few IU students who face the challenge of balancing going to classes and running their own company. \nAttending classes is not always top priority to the juniors and identical twins. Both are SPEA management majors with concentrations in business entrepreneurship. Since they registered at IU, the two have started businesses such as the CA$HCARD, a discount card distributed free to students and UrinSite, where they place advertisements in several bathrooms of bars and restaurants in the Bloomington area. Their most recent business venture is the purchase of a 24-foot mobile rock climbing wall which they sold to Hoosier Heights.\n"We can do whatever people want us to do if there's a dollar in the transaction," Andy said.\nAs they helped their parents pay for part of their out-of-state tuition, they sometimes questioned themselves on why they need a degree.\n"We never plan on working for anyone else, ever," Andy said. "We're getting a degree because everybody else in the world thinks you should have one. To us, the paper doesn't mean anything because we're not going to apply it."\n"We just want to graduate … but it's a pain to go to class everyday," Chad added. \nThe twins said they feel the majority of their classes do not benefit their future.\nThroughout their three years at school, Chad said the only class that helped him was Business K201, which taught him the use of Microsoft Excel and Access.\n"This class is a prime example of why you need college," he said. "I learned so much. It's one of my favorite classes and I use it almost everyday."\nAfter dropping the class once, Chad came out with a C the second time around.\n"We're not like Bill Gates," Andy said as he holds up his mid-term grade. "We're not brains. I definitely got a lower score on the SAT than most people I know, but I'm good at copying stuff. I can learn what they do … and do it better."\n"A normal, watch-TV, party-with-the-neighbor, half-gallon kind of guy" \nLast week, senior Josh La Tendresse had to miss his Thursday classes to fly to Chicago to check on some of his account representatives. La Tendresse is the founder and CEO of greekclothing.com -- a Web site that sells 5,000 fraternity and sorority items, which he started last December. He now has three distributors in Washington, Chicago and Washington, D.C. and six employees.\nAttracted by the Kelley School of Business, La Tendresse transferred to IU from Washington State University during the middle of his sophomore year.\nBalancing school and a business is manageable, he said, though he spends 10 to 15 hours weekly on his business. It helps that he is organized -- mapping everything from homework to meetings in his Palm Pilot. \n"It's hard to stay focused on study when 3,000 orders are coming in," La Tendresse said.\nBut time is something he feels he has plenty of.\n"It sounds like I'm busy, but I love procrastinating. I'm just a normal, watch-TV, party-with-the-neighbor, half-gallon kind of guy," he said.\nLa Tendresse plans on starting up more dot-com companies. He has already begun working on one with partners in Australia and China. \nFreshman entrepreneur\nThe second floor of Foster-Harper holds another one of IU's entrepreneurial students, freshman Brandon Rotstein. Rotstein's started his first company, jerseys4you.com, as a junior in high school. \n"I knew what people wanted and found a way to give it to them at a cheap price," he said.\nFocusing on hockey jerseys, jerseys4you.com serves clients in countries like Thailand, Japan, Germany, England and Czechoslovakia.\n"My biggest customer is in Alaska," he said. "This customer bought 850 jerseys just like that."\nLast semester, Rotstein pledged Alpha Epsilon Pi, took over as head manager for Greekyearbook.com for two months and managed his own online company. He was a full time student on the side. Since the beginning of this semester, Rotstein has been the IU manager for Collegeboxes. Collegeboxes is a nine-year-old storage company that serves 42 American colleges. Collegeboxes was so impressed by his online resume that they recruited him. \nLately, he has been working between 20 to 30 hours a week advertising for the company besides taking 16 credit hours in his business entrepreneurship major. \n"I don't have a good balance between work and school, and lately I haven't been going to class," he said.\nBut he enjoys what he's doing.\n"I have always been pretty entrepreneurial," Brandon said. "This is what I love"