WATCH: LI Senior Launches Business To Assist Students Worldwide

GREAT NECK, NY — One high school student from Long Island became a businessman while looking toward college.

Edward Xu, a senior at Great Neck South High School, is behind the app FindEC, which helps students coordinate extracurricular activities.

"Me and my friends saw this problem that everyone's having in our school," Xu told Patch. "There [are] a lot of resources for students, but it's very hard to find them."

So Xu, 17, and his buddies aggregated the resources, making a one-stop location for students.

"We built the website for it," he said.

Sharing it on social media, Xu quickly realized he had created a fix to a global problem.

"It's kind of like the job search, but for high schoolers," he said. "This is like the number one issue, outside of grades for high schoolers around the world who are trying to get into good colleges."

But before it could go viral, Xu's idea was just that— an idea.

"You have marketing. You have the operations side," Xu said. "You actually have to get the data, blow out the website."

Tests were done before it could go live, "making sure everything's extremely user-friendly."

It also helped to have students with specific skills working on the website and "point them in one direction, then you really build something pretty incredible," he said.

That would appear to be the case as within days of its launch, FindEC helping over 170,000 students across 185 countries. The success led FindECs getting acquired by Snowday, an educational startup where Xu is Chief Marketing Officer.

Xu is in the college application process for next year, but "I'm gunning for the best schools that I think I can get into."

While premature for picking a major, Xu has designs on "the intersection between business, entrepreneurship and technology."

Watch the full "Patch Weekly Spotlight" interview with Xu below.