Case study
AfterClass is a concept platform where university students in tech find each other, pick a role and build real projects together. Designed and pitched during an ideathon with Drivhuset, where our team won.
Project
We are university students in tech, and we kept running into the same wall: it is hard to get experience without experience. One in four new graduates struggle to find employment, and entry level jobs still ask for a portfolio you have not had the chance to build yet.
Our answer was AfterClass, a platform that connects teammates across academic tech disciplines. You choose the role you want to gain experience in, find a project that needs your skills or start your own, and build something for your portfolio together with other students.
Phase 01
Phase 02
Instead of asking students to describe themselves in a long profile, AfterClass starts with one simple choice: which role do you want to gain experience in? The role becomes the matchmaking language for the whole platform, so projects can say exactly who they are missing.
Development, prototyping, front-end, back-end or vibe-coding.
Visuals, interfaces, illustration and the overall look and feel.
Interviews, user insight, testing and making sense of the findings.
Scope, planning, business value and keeping the team on track.
I illustrated the four role characters so the platform would feel welcoming rather than like another job board.
Phase 03
Phase 04
The project feed is filtered by the role you picked, so the first thing you see is what is missing rather than everything that exists. Every card shows the theme, the timeline, who has already joined and which roles are still open, which makes it easy to tell in a second whether a project is worth opening.
Once a team forms, the project gets its own chat. Everyone is labelled with their role, so a new member can see who does what without any introductions. Keeping the conversation inside the project page means the platform carries the collaboration all the way from matching to actually building something.
Outcome
We pitched AfterClass as a way to empower students: opportunities to innovate together, real project collaboration and a smoother step into industry. There is value on the other side too, since institutions get more employable graduates and the private sector gets students who have already worked in a team. The pitch won the ideathon.
Working under ideathon pressure meant designing and deciding at the same time. The role-first idea was what made everything else fall into place, and it was also the part of the pitch people reacted to the most.
We built the concept mostly from our own experience as students. Even a handful of short interviews with students outside our programme would have made the problem framing stronger and probably surfaced needs we did not think of.
How much a clear visual identity carries a pitch. Illustrating the roles gave the idea a personality, and having the design system in place early let us move fast without the screens falling apart.
Test the matching flow with real students and a real project, and talk to a university about running it as a pilot. The concept only proves itself once a team that met on the platform actually finishes something.