ApplicAID, one student's platform to help others pursue educations

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

A UOC university student has created ApplicAID, an online tutoring system to assist students in the process of applying for scholarships, grants and other subsidized educational opportunities.

This project, which was presented in mid-June in the seventh edition of the SpinUOC entrepreneurship day, is the work of Pelumi Fadare, a student purusing a Master's degree in Social Media Management and Strategy at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). He is only 23 years old.

Despite his youth, he speaks English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, some Chinese, Arabic, Catalan and also Yoruba, the language of Nigeria, where he was born. In 2014, being so polyglot allowed him to participate in an international competition promoted by ESL Educational Services and the United Nations Organization (UN) and offer a speech together with other young people in the General Assembly, in New York. That experience and several other scholarships obtained before and after have resulted in this online tutoring system.

Its name is ApplicAID and it was launched at the end of 2018. It is an app aimed especially at students at risk of vulnerability because they have less economic resources or because they are at a disadvantage due to the fact, for example, of having migrated.

The basic objective of ApplicAID is to guide those students who seek support by opting for calls for subsidized educational opportunities, either because they have not previously achieved it or because it is the first time they have tried.

To do this, after registering on the web, the ApplicAID team will look for a mentor, that is, another person with previous experience in the field and, ideally, that has obtained the same scholarship or a very similar one before. This way you can explain to the mentor student how to approach the application and the keys to improve your chances of success.

"In my opinion, scholarships are like a school of life. You have to be able to convince a jury that you deserve it. Therefore, I always recommend asking for all those scholarships that interest us. So you learn to persuade, to believe in himself, to convey his motivation. And, whether he succeeds or not, he develops skills that he will rarely have learned in school or in college. It is a very important path," Fadare explains.

With this conviction, in 2015 he created the YouTube channel Ninjanspiration, where he offers information on how to get help to study, an experience that later led him to devise ApplicAID with the German Backtosch Mustafa, another young man with international concerns currently studying at Harvard.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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