When you enter the office of James D. Chung '88 at 127 Mt. Auburn St., you know that he is no ordinary college student. This gray and white Victorian building across the street from the Post Office isn't luxurious, but it is well-kempt, and Chung's college market consulting firm rents an office there several times larger than most Harvard dorm rooms.

Chung may only be 20-years-old but already he has the manner and momentoes of a well-heeled professional. On the wall a framed picture of Chung and Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) serves as a reminder of his days as a regional coordinator for the Republican leader and presidential candidate. Side-by-side with this political relic are the ski posters and maps from Chung's days, seven years ago as a student ski tour packager--the business in which Chung got his start. Next to these relics is the nerve center of his current enterprise--a map of the United States, covered with dots of the major college marketing areas on which he consults.

The office leaves no doubt that Chung is a very successful man. And this might be an Horatio Alger story except Chung says it happened all by accident.

The son of Korean immigrants, he grew up in Wichita, Kansas "with no regrets." James has two brothers, one older and one younger, but he is the first in his family to be born in the United States. His father is a professor of management at Wichita State University.

Chung says his father did not pressure him into business and management, but let his son decide for himself what he wanted to do. Chung decided to put what his father taught in the classroom into practice.

"My dad never prodded me. He always just let me do what I wanted to," says Chung, adding, "It was my mom who was always worried about what I was doing."

Chung's first business was a group ski tour operation that he claims he got into strictly by accident. An avid skier, Chung decided that other agencies in Kansas were doing a bad job packaging student ski trips. "They were sticking students in crappy places with bad service and I decided that I could do a better job myself," says Chung.

He says he had no grand plans when he started his business and that he was pulled into the enterprise by high school friends, who asked him to set up trips. He stuck with it because it was fun, he says.

"I wasn't planning a career or anything," chuckles Chung.

For Chung fun meant sitting down the summer before ski season and handling negotiations with suppliers, condominium-owners, bus charterers, and ski shops for the upcoming season. Then he would advertise in high schools throughout the Wichita area.

He chose to attend Harvard without regard to setting up a similar business in the Northeast. "I've never been much of a student," he says, "so I figured I would just try to keep my head above water academically when I got here."

Fate would once again uproot all of James Chung's plans.

During his freshman year, Chung answered an advertisement for cheap plane tickets with a firm in Brookline. The man on the other end of the phone, Richard Aiken, was a travel agent in a bind. Chung bought the tickets and more.

Aiken's firm had just picked up a new promotional account for a magazine and they were backlogged with work. "James and I started talking and it turned out that we had been in the same businesses, so I invited him to work for me part-time," Aiken says.

After several months of working for Aiken, Chung decided it was time to be more than just a student once again. So he reopened his travel packaging business. And in January of last year, Aiken became an associate in the ski and airline sector of the new James Chung Associates (JCA).