Yapahall will become the indispensable toolkit to communicate with others who have gone before them, building a treasure house of communal experiential knowledge, which future students can access, adapt, and add to.
College is expensive and often very difficult. Students need a platform where they can share insights and lifehacks with other students taking similar coursework, to make their study time smoother and more effective. They need a way to quickly ask and answer questions. Yapahall incorporates the most useful aspects of LinkedIn, Slack, and Quora, all in an easy-to-use interface: it provides a practical academic network and student-to-student marketplace for textbooks and course materials. It is more than a mere network: it empowers students' success, and enables them to empower other students in turn. The platform matches a student with a need or a question with students who can meet that need or answer that question, helping everyone exchange resources more efficiently, especially near the end and start of each semester.
Our team comes from different countries and backgrounds: China, Korea, and the Dominican Republic, one PhD student in CS, one graduate student in CS and an undergraduate student in economics. The team is diverse & knows firsthand the problems undergrad, grad, & doctoral students face on campus. We have different skill sets and perspectives, but we are all committed to seeing Yapahall flourish, becoming the Slack of the world of academia (for students, that is) and the dominant brand in its role. We are all committed to seeing the next generation of students benefit from (and enjoy!) a level of belonging, integration, and academic continuity that we could only dream of. Perhaps LA Hacks can help us achieve that goal.
We have already interviewed several college students and talked to 5 professors about the challenges college students are facing on campus, and our proposed solution to meet many of these challenges. Next, we are seeking gatekeepers of specific groups of students at major universities, for our initial rollout: a campus athletic director, a professor of a required history course (and his team of TAs), a lead academic advisor in charge of integrating transfer students, a committee chair for international-student orientation. We know how we will pitch to those gatekeepers, but we will pay careful attention to how they pitch Yapahall to their constituents: those insights will help us craft targeted pitches to similar audiences in the future.
We believe Yapa Hall will become a daily toolkit for every college student in the future. By students, for students!
(Demo username: [email protected], password: 111111)
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