CV & Study Plan Writer
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Written by the man who can, on 28-04-2008

I teach English in Taiwan, and many of my students are planning to study overseas. One common task I have to help them with is to write their CVs and study plans for UK university.

Both are fairly standardised forms containing factual information that, for the most part, doesn't vary too wildly.

There are CV writing services and websites out there, but they usually work in one language only. And study plans are a specialised market that nobody has tapped yet.

Actually, UK universities don't ask Taiwanese students for real study plans . They ask for a one-page document listing the student's background, reasons for choosing a particular course & university, and their objectives after gaining the qualification. In other words, it's a covering letter following a strict format.

Many students struggle to produce these documents, partly because they have never learned this style of writing. The issue is one of culture, rather than of language.

So think about those webforms you fill in when you visit, for instance, certain dating sites. You select options from drop-down menus, or click radio buttons, in response to prompts like "hairstyle"  and the site then generates a profile of you in written form:

"I'm a bedhead with flaming red hair....."

Some of the more sophisticated sites can do this in multi-language formats. You pick the options in English, but anyone reading the German version of the site will see the phrase in their own language.

So, obviously it's perfectly feasible to offer choices in Chinese and produce a well-written document in English from the information given. And once you've done that you can offer the same service in other languages just by editing the front-end interface.

It shouldn't be a problem to vary the output a bit by having several ways to present the same information:

"I'm a bedhead with flaming red hair..."  or  "my flaming red locks are quite unruly" - same meaning, different choice of words.

FWIW, foreign students now contribute more money to the UK economy than tourism does. It's a huge industry. 10,000 students a year from Taiwan to the UK alone. They're spending a lot of money, and getting a study plan together is usually a major hurdle. So they pay someone to do it. Making it available online would be a major help. 

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