About Int’ly
Int’ly is the first program dedicated to meeting the needs of all international students to share information, exchange learning knowledge and connect on a comprehensive platform. Its founder, Yeonsu Kim, a South Korean student at DKU, and her team successfully raised funds from the South Korean government for their novel idea.
Now Int’ly is about to open its Beta in the upcoming week, and Yeonsu targets the United States as its primary market and would like to expand its user pool to the Top 6 English speaking countries the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. For further development of the platform, Yeonsu’s Team, ZEXT Inc., would like to raise more funding from Dii and various Venture Capitals. In particular, DKU Dii supports campus-based solutions and provides 30,000 RMB scale funding to ZEXT per year.
Creating Intentions
As the founder of such a unique platform, Yeonsu started Int’ly because of the upcoming experience of studying at Duke University in the US. She and her team from the US and Canada felt that international students were always trying to find resources on academic, career and college life. However, international students tend to stay in their own nationality group and share the information within the group – there are limited sources and quantities of information. Surely there are also many international students who succeed in finding stable jobs and settling down, but it is difficult for them to share their successful experiences with other international students. Existing information exchanges, such as Linkedin and Facebook, make it difficult for users to get help anonymously, so they often don’t know who to turn to when they’re in personal trouble. Based on this phenomenon, Yeonsu and her team came up with a solution to this problem: sharing, learning and connecting, bringing all international students together to improve information exchange.
Int’ly’s Features
Adhering to the tenet of “Bring all international students together”, Yeonsu has not stopped at building Int’ly into an open online community. In order to fully demonstrate the difference between Int’ly and other information exchange platforms, Yeonsu also carefully introduced the features of the platform during the project presentation. Int’ly allows student users to build their own campus networks and deliver more targeted and effective information to international students in the network than other information platforms. In this environment, each international student can establish their own campus network by inviting 30 friends. This feature is called “My Campus”. When you join the “My Campus” you can access your own campus community for international students. It helps international students who have difficulty adapting campus environment and makes the students support each other.
Another feature of Int’ly is the Interview Bank. Interview Bank is an interview database for international students, and it provides international users’ experience on internships, full-time jobs, undergraduate, graduate, and exchange students. Since many international students pursue to study or work abroad, Interview bank is the most informational feature of Int’ly.
Photo of Int’ly Team (Left One: Yoensu Kim)
Project Experiences
As a rising sophomore, Yeonsu also faced some difficulties in the early stage like team building and development issues. It takes almost a whole year to open the Beta, but she said it is a worthwhile journey for the gap year. Yeonsu has a strong vision for Int’ly. She believes Int’ly will make the world so that international students can study and work abroad without the information gap.
Yeonsu is now considering combining Int’ly with her signature work. She is sure that the experience of participating in Dii and founding Int’ly will be a great asset in her future career. She said Dii’s professional advice with mentors as well as funding support let her draw realistic future business plans. Therefore, She greatly recommends Dii to new entrepreneurs like her as well as the students who are interested in startup fields. Yeonsu emphasized that one of the great advantages of Dii is student-based programs so that student entrepreneurs can manage their academic processes and startup projects together. Not only to the beginners like her, she greatly recommended Dii programs to those who are interested in startup fields with no prior experience.
For the Open Beta in June, she will actively promote her platform to US-based campus communities including Duke and Duke Kunshan students. Please stay tuned and meet various promotion events of Int’ly. Int’ly is here waiting for you!