A frictionless coffee chat alternative for students. Sunbae creates easily browsable "alumni profiles" with curated advice and recommendations organized in simple lists.

The purpose of Sunbae is to enable students to receive free, actionable advice from their department alumni without having to request a coffee chat. Oftentimes, the most useful advice a student gets from an alumni during a coffee chat are "linkable" and "actionable": recommended courses, books, links, events, favorite professors, clubs, podcasts. Even specific campus tips like best study spots and restaurants.

You don't, shouldn't, have to go through the small talk of a coffee chat to access this base level of mentorship and advice. At the same time, Sunbae won't, shouldn't completely replace coffee chats. Coffee chats are a great way to connect with alumni on a more personal level. We simply provide an alternative. The coffee chat process is inherently full of friction: you awkwardly cold-message an alumni, the alumni has to make time in their schedule to meet with the student, and then you have to juggle through an impromptu conversation. This process limits the total advice output of an alumni to single, isolated 1:1s at a time. We're essentially trying to "scale" the reach of an alumni's advice so that it reaches as many freshmen and curious young minds as possible.

Some project pointers:

• Each school department will have a few handpicked "alumni profiles". Oftentimes, the advice we read on the internet is not localized. The lived experience of a student from one school/department is completely different from a student in a different school. We think students will appreciate advice coming specifically from alumni who walked the same path in the past.

• Built-in AMA feature so that alumni can answer questions asynchronously whenever they have the time. Answers would be public so that students with similar gripes can browse through previous answers.

• Currently, there is a market predisposition to paywall advice, and while this is understandable to a certain extent (especially specialized career advice), at the very least, there shouldn't be barriers for the most basic school advice. What's even more, we are seeing this trend whereby professionals are volunteering their own time to mentor strangers looking to progress their careers. We expect this trend to trickle down to schools.

• Sunbae (선배) is the Korean word for "school senior".