ULinked

 

Name: Yiwen (Claire) Wang NYU affiliation: Steinhardt NYU status: Graduate

Did you enter last year?: No Do you have any teammates?: No How many, including yourself?:

 

Concept Name

ULinked

 

High Concept Statement

A “Think Tank” for grad school applicants. An online community-based knowledge sharing platform for getting high quality information, right people’s suggestion, and admission prediction.

 

Status Quo

Compared to college application, grad school applicants are facing more challenges:
(1)Diverse admission criteria and timelines for different programs; (2)No information about the admission progress and little community (emotionally) support during the daunting misery when waiting for decisions;(3) Previous successful/failed candidates don’t know where to share experience and information; (4) Suggestions are too general or biased.

 

Competition

(1)Browsing on the internet for information (time consuming and poor outcome). (2)Asking for advice from people who they know/can find (general, inaccurate or biased information). (3)Existing websites or apps: more information aggregation platforms or search engines with official information, less concrete suggestions. No community support. (4)The Grad Cafe is a nice website with active discussion forum and a admission results database, but the it’s not intuitive and the big data has been underused.

 

Solution

(1)A knowledge sharing platform for grad school applicants – giving/getting valuable information about target program, meeting people from your dream program. (2) Contribute the admission data point and get the prediction by the large database. (3)Reading/Hearing other people’s admissions journey and mapping out your own journey.

 

Revenue Model

Freemium. Basic functions are free. The customer pays for talking to current students or alumni from the target programs. Or the universities pays for hiring the ambassadors to talk to prospective students who are using the forum.

 

Which platform would you like to launch your app on?

Android Phone

 

Which category best describes your app?

Education