Fourth-year UC Irvine students Sihyun Park and Kyumin Kwack are set to release their mobile app ClassMate in early June.
The app combines features such as course planning, community forums and campus news, aiming to consolidate school-related navigation tools.
Park, an economics major, and Kwack, an electrical engineering major, are exchange students from Yonsei University in South Korea. They created ClassMate after struggling to navigate campus resources and organize their daily lives.
“We had no information [about] how all the classes were, and what kind of other services there are, and we didn’t know where to ask, most of all, and we both had a really hard time figuring that out by ourselves,” Kwack told New University. “We had to ask my friends what apps I can use, and what kind of communities there are. And we found this very inconvenient.”
Drawing from their experience using apps like Everytime, described as “Korea’s largest university life platform,” Park and Kwack aimed to bring a similar level of convenience to students in the United States.
As opposed to relying on multiple websites with singular functions, ClassMate integrates academics and community into one mobile platform without the delay of loading separate pages. The app’s homepage combines a GPA tracker and assignment to-do lists, while additional tabs allow students to message classmates and share schedules.
“One of our main goals was to be able to just check everything on your phone right away, edit your schedule right away, so all of this is related to, your campus life,” Kwack said. “We kind of wanted to bring that all together in one place so you don’t have to jump across, for example, Zotcourse and AntAlmanac, or if you want to ask questions about or get information about a course, you have to go to a real-life professor.”
Neither Park and Kwack have formal computer science backgrounds. They found themselves learning how to program while developing ClassMate and bringing their idea to life.
“The brief knowledge that I have throughout courses, plus, with a little help of AI, we got to learn how to make this app, how the front end works, how the back end works, how those two communicate together and how you need to distribute the app to others. We kind of figured it out along the way,” Kwack said.
After introducing their idea on the UC Irvine subreddit, ClassMate was met with positive feedback and excitement from students.
“We uploaded ClassMate [on] Reddit, and actually, almost 200 students pressed like to us and now our [number of] users is 40 people, including international students and full-time students here,” Park told New University.
Having entered their beta stage through TestFlight, the next step for ClassMate is to officially launch the app on major platforms.
“We now [have] applied to Y Combinator, and we are waiting for the result,” Park said. “And if we [get accepted] to Y Combinator and get investment from there, then we can launch this officially.”
ClassMate aims to streamline university life for both international and domestic students.
“We’re here [for] just one year. But [if] another student came again, another Korean student came again here and [felt] the same inconvenience, we want to fix that point,” Park said. “Every international student and undergraduate student [at] UCI wants to feel more [convenience] in their university life. So that’s our goal, and that’s why we made this app.”
Briana Chen is a Features Intern for the spring 2026 quarter. She can be reached at brianac6@uci.edu.
Edited by Aditya Biswas and Charleen Pan.