With $10,000 Amazon Prize, Zicklin Undergrad Builds Study App for Baruch and Beyond
November 8, 2024
Baruch College undergraduate Carlos Vazquez (BBA, ’26) wanted to help others but wound up helping himself.
The son of immigrants who didn’t finish school, Carlos was flying blind when it came to the college search process. “My mom’s from El Salvador and my dad’s from Mexico,” the Westchester native says. “They dropped out before high school—life was like that there.”
Nevertheless, like many other first-generation students, he landed at Baruch. “I wanted to be in Manhattan, where it’s much easier to get internships,” he explains. “I figured that would build my confidence.”
Perhaps it was newfound confidence that inspired the budding entrepreneur to create something that could help first-generation students like himself: a college discovery app. The idea was that users would input their grades, extracurricular activities, and so on, and see which colleges they might have a chance at entering.
But to make a long story short, “It turned out I didn’t know enough about being a guidance counselor to build that type of app,” Carlos says. So he morphed it into a test-prep platform to help users study for the SAT and other entrance exams. That got around 100 users, but he wanted a larger customer base, so he pivoted again and built it into a Baruch-focused study aid.
Introducing Acadu (pronounced “Ah-KAH-doo”), a platform where students interact with AI-powered tutors to study for their Baruch courses. Launched less than a year ago, it’s already generated buzz, especially after Carlos won first place and a $10,000 award from Amazon in last spring’s CUNY Clash competition.
Like Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, Acadu gamifies the learning process. Students can type in a topic—for example, “elasticity of demand” —and the app will generate a quiz, with easy, medium, or hard questions, depending on the difficulty level the user chooses. A multiplayer feature lets people study in groups, and users can compete against one another on leaderboards where they win points for studying. They can even upload their slides from Baruch courses and the app will automatically generate questions.
Today, Acadu has nearly 300 subscribers—a number that’s more than doubled in the last four months alone. Carlos plans to use his prize money to continue building the app across Baruch courses: “We’re taking a bottoms-up approach, trying to get as many users as possible to tinker with the product before we think about monetizing.” Once the Baruch version is “perfected,” he plans to replicate Acadu for other CUNYs, starting with John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“After that, who knows?” Carlos says. “If we can replicate it across all of CUNY, maybe that’ll be next.”
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