Happy with what you have done till now in your career, but confused how to go ahead? NextLeap has the answers for you. Shradha Mohanty reports.
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| Suruchi Wagh Founder & CEO, nextLeap |
This virtual counselor, founded by Suruchi Wagh, helps Indian students get into targeted engineering universities in India as well as USA. Basically, NextLeap functions as a recommendation engine which helps students make smarter career decisions. It involves a suite of applications, which use psychometric evaluations and math models on past admission patterns to give out personalized suggestions to students.
It just takes a couple of simple steps - register on the website with an email ID or do so with your Facebook ID in one single click!
Addressing abundance and dearth
There are a multitude of universities in USA and the biggest pain point for students aspiring to do an MS course lies in identifying the 8-10 universities where they have a chance of admission. NextLeap helps them in doing so by collating data on their scores and profile information and providing personalized suggestions for each user.
Other pain points which students face include finding funds to support the education, managing applications and preparing for VISA interviews etc. Through its suite of applications, NextLeap handholds a student through the entire admission process and gives suggestions for each pain point.
Although it does not have any counselors on board it helps students in applying to universities, finding funds, practicing for interviews etc. The NextLeap team comprises engineers, marketers and data analysts from some of the top colleges like BITS Pilani, COEP, PICT etc.
Suruchi Wagh did her Computer Engineering at the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), and followed it up with a Masters in Engineering Management at University of Southern California, USA (USC).
Coming from a humble family, she herself faced the frustrations of aranging for funds. It was really frustrating to run behind banks with their endless paper work and constraints. Many of her friends didn’t have any one to act as guarantors for their loans. She saw some deserving friends drop the idea of MS because of inability to gather funds.
Suruchi’s personal experience encouraged her to devise this new technique that would make application process to the US universities easier for Indian students and young professionals who want to pursue their higher studies in the USA.
| Applications which help |
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University Suggestor helps students choose the right universities College Suggestor helps XIIth Std. students aspiring to do engineering Branch Suggestor allows XIIth Std. students to assess their personality, inclination and interest towards the right branch of engineering. |
Going Viral
The website has a traffic of several thousand students across India which goes up higher on weekends as many students visit the cyber cafes to access the site. “The platform has grown majorly via word of mouth and inbuilt viral elements, which prompts a student to tell his friends about NextLeap,” says Suruchi.
They mainly use social media marketing on Facebook to reach out to students. Although it provides information on colleges from India and USA, there are a lot more students who study in India. Hence, there are a greater number of users for the India market. Currently they do not provide information of any other countries but plans are on way to expand to a more global audience.
NextLeap is currently completely bootstrapped, that is, it runs on the personal savings of the entrepreneur. “The amount of investment is confidential as we are a Pvt. Ltd. company. We are already generating revenues through our freemium model, but we have not broken even yet,” explains Suruchi. For now, NextLeap is building upon its current math models to expand into newer markets apart from engineering.
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