Why I’m Working on Unipeers.org
One of the most challenging aspects of studying abroad is understanding how the other country’s educational system works well enough to apply to your top school, get admitted, and get a scholarship or funding. Having grown up in Spain and completed my Bachelor of Engineering in the UK and my Master of Engineering in the US, I’m familiar with how overwhelming this process is.
Questions like “What tests do I need to take?”, “Can I take them in my home country?”, “What Visa do I need?”, “How can I get a scholarship?”, “What’s the student culture like over there?”, “What do they look for in a cover letter?”, “What’s the housing like?” are easy for me to answer now that I’m an alumni, but kept me awake at night while planning my move abroad.
As a prospective student, I had three ways of finding the answers. The first one was to email student services. This helped me to answer questions related to VISA and paperwork, but didn’t give me much insight on whether the school would be a good fit. The second option was to Google. This led me to anonymous forums and generic articles which weren’t trustworthy enough considering the life-changing nature of the decision I needed to make. The final option was to ask students or alumni at the universities. Since they had been through the same process, this proved to be the most efficient way to learn about the school and the system. They knew what departments I should email about what, where to look for scholarships, what the student culture was like, what the best housing options were, etc. Speaking to a student for 15 minutes would save me hours of online searches, lost emails, and frustration.
Having learnt this, I started to reach out to students at the universities I was interested in via LinkedIn and other platforms. Living in another country, and not knowing anyone where I was looking to move to made this challenging. Not only was I having difficulty filtering out who to message, but after spending hours sending message requests I was often met with silence. This made me feel lost, overwhelmed and discouraged.
I’m grateful to my past self for persevering and getting through the process, but also aware that there were a few times when the feeling of being lost almost caused me to return home. I will always remember my first week in the UK. I’d bought a ticket back to Spain for the following week out of fear of not liking it there. It was another student who who took me under his wing and taught me all about the culture and the educational system. Thanks to this act of kindness, I cancelled the flight and lived there for 4 years — staying was the best and most life-changing decision I’ve made so far.
As a result of this experience, I’ve volunteered to answer international student questions many times over the past few years, and always try my best to reply to prospective students who reach out to me online. I get asked the same questions multiple times, and I can’t help but think how much time would be saved if each answer could reach thousands of students at a time, saving them the stress of individually reaching out to me and other alumni. That’s why, in a team with Katie Donahoe, I’m working to launch unipeers. Katie is a brilliant, hardworking and dependable engineer, and I couldn’t have found a better person to start this journey with.
Unipeers is a nonprofit community of student and alumni ambassadors from top US universities whose goal is to help prospective students learn more about STEM and MBA programs at graduate schools in the US and resources available to them.
So far we’ve recruited 220+ members from Cornell University and MIT by word-of-mouth and student newsletters, and got very encouraging feedback from the prospective students we’ve helped out. Over the next few months we will be expanding within those and eight more universities—Stanford, Harvard, Yale, UPenn, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, Dartmouth College — and refining our strategy based on the lessons we learn.
Our goal is to empower students to help each other through the ups and downs of applying to graduate school, and make sure no one ever feels the need to buy a return ticket home.
