North Dakota State University’s Nice Center, founded in Jan. 2019 and funded by philanthropy through the In Our Hands campaign, supports students’ ideas and helps them advance those ideas in the marketplace. For Dieumerci Christel ’21, the Nice Center opened up a world of possibilities as he completed his degree and advanced his business.

“Without NDSU, specifically the Nice Center, I wouldn’t be doing this because I got a lot of opportunities I couldn’t afford to do by myself,” Dieumerci, a business management major and entrepreneurship minor, said.

Before enrolling at NDSU, Dieumerci started his business, Enlightapp, which “helps teachers become experts on their students by allowing students to share their uniqueness through self-created student profiles.” Dieumerci was inspired to create the tool for teachers based on his own educational experiences after immigrating to the U.S. when he was 13.

“I wasn’t the best student in the world,” Dieumerci said with a grin. “I was a C student by choice because I felt like my education and my interests and passions were getting in the way of each other.”

Dieumerci recalled feeling alone in his educational journey because he didn’t feel teachers understood his living situation. As the third youngest of nine children, the home computer sometimes wouldn’t free up until 2 a.m. for Dieumerci to complete homework. When teachers said they cared about him and his success, he struggled to believe them because they neither knew him personally nor appreciated his passions — he calls it an “empathy gap” between teachers and students.