ConnectEd
Don't wanna read? Listen my story!!
ConnectEd is a community platform where college students can post their questions and get answers from seniors who have already been through it. Academics, placements, college life — the things that matter and the things no syllabus covers. Built in third year of engineering. Co-created with Sakshi Retharekar.
Role:
Co-creator — design and development
Duration:
1 month
The Story
01
College is full of questions that arrive too late. Which electives actually matter? How do seniors prepare for placements? What do you wish you had known in second year?
The answers exist. They just live with the people who have already been through it — not in any classroom, not in any textbook, not in any official resource the college provides. Every senior carries knowledge that a junior somewhere desperately needs. And most of the time, those two people never find each other.
Sakshi and I had both felt that gap. The advice we got from the right senior at the right moment changed things. The question was: what if that did not have to be accidental?
What We Built
02
ConnectEd
A platform where students post their doubts and experienced seniors answer them. Academics, placement prep, college life anything a junior might be navigating that a senior has already figured out.
No gatekeeping. No hierarchy. Just a community built on the idea that the most useful knowledge is the kind that comes from someone who walked the exact same path a year or two before you.
Built with: Next.js, Clerk, and MongoDB. It was also the project where we learned that building for a community means designing for trust making it easy enough to ask, and welcoming enough that people actually want to answer.
Why It
Mattered
03
We did not build ConnectEd because there was a market opportunity. We built it because we knew what it felt like to need someone who had already been through it and how rare it was to actually find them.
The platform was our way of making that less rare. A place where juniors could ask without embarrassment, seniors could give back without friction, and the gap between "I wish someone had told me this" and "I needed to hear this" got a little smaller.
ConnectEd
Don't wanna read? Listen my story!!
ConnectEd is a community platform where college students can post their questions and get answers from seniors who have already been through it. Academics, placements, college life — the things that matter and the things no syllabus covers. Built in third year of engineering. Co-created with Sakshi Retharekar.
Role:
Co-creator — design and development
Duration:
1 month
The Story
01
College is full of questions that arrive too late. Which electives actually matter? How do seniors prepare for placements? What do you wish you had known in second year?
The answers exist. They just live with the people who have already been through it — not in any classroom, not in any textbook, not in any official resource the college provides. Every senior carries knowledge that a junior somewhere desperately needs. And most of the time, those two people never find each other.
Sakshi and I had both felt that gap. The advice we got from the right senior at the right moment changed things. The question was: what if that did not have to be accidental?
What We Built
02
ConnectED
A platform where students post their doubts and experienced seniors answer them. Academics, placement prep, college life anything a junior might be navigating that a senior has already figured out.
No gatekeeping. No hierarchy. Just a community built on the idea that the most useful knowledge is the kind that comes from someone who walked the exact same path a year or two before you.
Built with: Next.js, Clerk, and MongoDB. It was also the project where we learned that building for a community means designing for trust making it easy enough to ask, and welcoming enough that people actually want to answer.
Why It Mattered
03
We did not build ConnectEd because there was a market opportunity. We built it because we knew what it felt like to need someone who had already been through it and how rare it was to actually find them.
The platform was our way of making that less rare. A place where juniors could ask without embarrassment, seniors could give back without friction, and the gap between "I wish someone had told me this" and "I needed to hear this" got a little smaller.
ConnectEd
Don't wanna read? Listen my story!!
ConnectEd is a community platform where college students can post their questions and get answers from seniors who have already been through it. Academics, placements, college life — the things that matter and the things no syllabus covers. Built in third year of engineering. Co-created with Sakshi Retharekar.
Role:
Co-creator — design and development
Duration:
1 month
The Story
01
College is full of questions that arrive too late. Which electives actually matter? How do seniors prepare for placements? What do you wish you had known in second year?
The answers exist. They just live with the people who have already been through it — not in any classroom, not in any textbook, not in any official resource the college provides. Every senior carries knowledge that a junior somewhere desperately needs. And most of the time, those two people never find each other.
Sakshi and I had both felt that gap. The advice we got from the right senior at the right moment changed things. The question was: what if that did not have to be accidental?
What We Built
02
ConnectEd
A platform where students post their doubts and experienced seniors answer them. Academics, placement prep, college life anything a junior might be navigating that a senior has already figured out.
No gatekeeping. No hierarchy. Just a community built on the idea that the most useful knowledge is the kind that comes from someone who walked the exact same path a year or two before you.
Built with: Next.js, Clerk, and MongoDB. It was also the project where we learned that building for a community means designing for trust making it easy enough to ask, and welcoming enough that people actually want to answer.
Why It Mattered
03
We did not build ConnectEd because there was a market opportunity. We built it because we knew what it felt like to need someone who had already been through it and how rare it was to actually find them.
The platform was our way of making that less rare. A place where juniors could ask without embarrassment, seniors could give back without friction, and the gap between "I wish someone had told me this" and "I needed to hear this" got a little smaller.