What's Bruin?

Inspiration

Building real connections in college is hard. And finding the right people — those who actually align with your ambitions — is even harder. As sophomores, we realized how easy it was to miss out on potential mentors and opportunities simply because we didn't know where to look. We wanted to create something we wish we had freshman year: a smarter, more welcoming way for students to build their personal brand and forge meaningful relationships with alumni and professors who could genuinely help them grow.

What's Bruin? was born out of that idea — a tool to bridge the gap between students and the incredible resources that already exist around them but are often hidden or overwhelming to find.

What it does

What's Bruin? is an all-in-one personal branding and networking platform for students. Using DAIN's intelligent decision engine, the platform identifies which services would be most impactful for each user — whether that's connecting with alumni, professors, or additional support systems.

Our flagship feature takes a student's personality traits, ambitions, and interests, and cross-references them with a filtered database of thousands of vetted alumni and faculty members using Linkd. Instead of sifting through endless LinkedIn profiles or faculty directories, students are instantly matched with individuals who share common goals, backgrounds, and research interests — setting the foundation for authentic, high-value conversations.

We enrich each match with detailed information such as university affiliation, department, email address, research area, and relevant publications, giving students immediate context to start meaningful interactions.

How we built it

We leveraged DAIN’s dynamic tool selection capabilities to route students to services that made the most sense based on their goals. For our flagship tool, we integrated Linkd’s data parsing features to create a filtering engine that matches users to mentors based on traits like academic focus, extracurricular passions, and long-term aspirations.

By layering DAIN’s flexibility with the precision of our matching algorithm, What's Bruin? acts as both a smart advisor and an opportunity gateway. We engineered the system to handle real student input in an intuitive and welcoming way, minimizing friction and maximizing meaningful outcomes.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning, our entire project was built around Spectacles hardware. We spent the majority of Friday and Saturday deep in technical integration — only to realize, after endless troubleshooting and hardware/software incompatibility issues (especially with Windows environments), that it wasn't going to be feasible to demo.

It was an incredibly difficult decision, but late Saturday night, we decided to scrap our original work and pivot to an idea we had been passionate about but hadn't had time to explore until now. We built What's Bruin? from the ground up in under 10 hours, relying on pure collaboration, speed, and resilience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our ability to pivot under intense time pressure without sacrificing the quality or purpose behind our work. Instead of throwing together a "quick fix" idea, we doubled down on solving a real student pain point that we understood deeply.

We’re proud of building something that could genuinely help students open doors that otherwise stay closed — and proud that even when everything went sideways, we pushed through and built something we believe in.

What we learned

This project taught us how to rapidly connect powerful technologies like DAIN into real-world use cases that directly impact students. We learned how important it is to stay flexible and build projects not just based on technical coolness, but on real needs and real users.

We also learned the value of thoughtful, human-centered matching — how much stronger and more meaningful a connection becomes when it's not random, but intentional and aligned from the start.

What's next for What's Bruin?

While the current version of What's Bruin? focuses on building personal brands through alumni and professor connections, our original vision was always bigger. We recognized a major gap in the marketing space: every project today — whether student-led or business-driven — needs traction, research, outreach, and design support to truly succeed.

We imagine What's Bruin? evolving into a full-stack marketing and opportunity platform — one that can understand your goals and, using DAIN's decision engine, automatically recommend the best custom-designed services from a tailored suite.

In the future, we envision What's Bruin? offering at least the additional services:

For students:

Built-in project market research generators
Survey creation and distribution tools for gathering real-world and campus-based insights

For businesses:

Auto-generated marketing assets (posters, flyers, standing board designs)
Social media growth packages (Instagram posts, TikTok reels, content calendars)

Our dream is to simplify and streamline all the complexity behind building your brand or launching your ideas — giving students and young entrepreneurs a true one-stop-shop for connections, marketing, and growth. We want What's Bruin? to become the starting point for any student or small business trying to launch with clarity, confidence, and community.