Faces of Penn State, 2009: Ujjwal Gupta
Credit: London Wolfe photography
Winter 2009/2010—Imagine a day when textbooks and laptops are no longer seen on college campuses, when all of the learning tools a student might need — from chemical structures to GRE practice problems — will be carried around in a lightweight iPhone instead. This is the future that Ujjwal Gupta envisions, and he already is helping to make it a reality.
A Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry, Gupta recently created a company, called Watermelon Express, which is revolutionizing the way students are interacting with educational content on smart phones. Watermelon Express builds educational applications for iPhone that enable students to study for standardized tests for admission to academic programs such as the SAT, GRE, GMAT, MCAT and LSAT. “I have always wanted to start a business,” he said. So, in addition to taking chemistry courses and working on his dissertation research on sub-nanometer-size metal particles, Gupta took entrepreneurship courses in the Smeal College of Business. Eventually he and his friend Ashish Rangnekar, who works for Capital One in New York City, came up with the idea for Watermelon Express. “We realized that there is a huge desire to be able to access educational content while on the go,” he said. “The market for educational iPhone applications is huge and is growing fast.”
In May 2009, Watermelon Express won Smeal’s IdeaPitch Entrepreneurship Competition, which provides budding Penn State entrepreneurs with the tools, skills, and resources necessary to successfully pitch their ideas to investors, while providing exposure to potential backer. Gupta said his company is adopting a unique approach to education by combining aspects of social collaboration, peer competition, and a rewards system. The company also is working to integrate the mobile platform with the desktop-computer and Web platforms so that they all work together. “Say you are on a New York subway train and you are studying for the GMAT test so you can get into a graduate program in management. You answered five practice questions on your cell phone. With our new applications, you will be able to go home and open software on your computer and it will synchronize with the cell phone and figure out what questions you already have answered, so you don’t have to go through the whole process again.”
In addition, a user can compare his or her answers to those of others via the Web. The user can interact with fellow students from around the world using the company’s online forums and can form local study groups using the study-sessions tool. Gupta said he feels good about this aspect of his products because he feels that education, today, lacks a competitive and collaborative spirit. “We want to combine the fun and competitive flavor of social-gaming with a social-collaboration atmosphere in order to get people more involved and more motivated to perform well in academics. We also are working on a reward system that would encourage users to study more and to achieve higher scores.”
Gupta’s plans for the company include building applications for a variety of academic subjects. For example, he has created an application for organic chemistry that gives students basic information about the subject that they can carry along with them and use as a pocket study guide and handy reference tool.
Gupta said that his chemistry education at Penn State has helped to prepare him for this business endeavor in many ways. “The skill-set I have developed at Penn State has made me feel confident that I can learn anything,” he said. “For example, before I came to Penn State I didn’t know what a Swagelok was, and now I use all sorts of tools to maintain a multi-million-dollar chemistry instrument. In my opinion, a very important lesson to learn is that anyone can do anything if there is enough motivation to do it.”