⌨️ UCalgary scholarship

Extra Curricular Activity Details

• school/community:
• Activity type:
• description: For over a year, I’ve been working on building Exo & Orbit. Two apps aiming to reduce the barrier to human connection. Exo helps people have better conversations with their partners and friends. Orbit aims to fight loneliness in university
• leadership role:

Briefly describe your extra-curricular activities which demonstrate community service, leadership, and/or  volunteerism. Outline your contribution, the time commitment required and what you learned as a result of participating

• I believe that university is such a valuable time of our lives because so many opportunities open up for you if you learn to seize them. In some way, this ability to seize these opportunities is something that can be gradually improved like a muscle.
• This is why I think it’s important to engage in a variety of extracurricular activities during university.
• My main extra-curicular activity that I have been doing for over two years now is content creation. Specifically doing things on campus to increase belongingness and sense of community within students.
• Side note:
  • I’ve visited several universities for hackathons where I represent UCalgary and build a software project over a weekend. After the hackathon, we get to present our project to judges who decide on the winners that get prizes. Just yesterday, I participated in one in UCLA where I won the best use of AI: https://devpost.com/software/orbit-w84iq1
  • during my time in these universities, I noticed that that the university students were much more connected and they felt like they are part something big.
  • This is one of my main motivations for why I create these content. I wanna make UCalgary a more fun and connected university.
• I’ve done several kind of social videos and I continue experimenting with different styles. Till now, I have done 3 style of videos:
  • Asking students for dares and for every one I get, I donate to charity
    • I am a big believer that donation should be a recurring thing everyone should do to keep their souls pure and filled with generosity. I am a strong believer that
    • I thought, if they see someone do these uncomfortable acts, they’re more likely let go of the things that stop them. In other words, inspire them to do more uncomfortable things
  • Giving students dares that puts them into uncomfortable situations and for every dare people do, I donate to charity
    • After creating the video where people give me dares, I realized that a better way to inspire people to do uncomfortable acts is by giving them the dares and donating to charity + free coffee if they do it.
    • I managed to help people make friends and gym buddies through the dares I gave them. This ties to my other venture I have been working on called Orbit which I will talk more about in the next question.
  • Interviewing strangers all around campus and giving them a platform to share their thoughts and advice for all other students now and in the future
    • It was genuinely a pleasure getting to know and understand people and having meaningful conversations with them. It just showed me the power of listening and how to have an interesting conversation, you just need to be interested in them. If you think that the other person is boring, the truth is you just haven’t asked the right questions or noticed the right things about that person (what makes them tick)
• You can find all these videos in here: https://youtube.com/@ramimaalouf

Describe how you have demonstrated entrepreneurial actions, assembled resources to achieve a significant outcome, contributed to community, shown leadership in your chosen field, embraced academics and extracurricular activities

• Over this past year, I have spent over 700 hours working on 2 mobile apps—Exo and Orbit, and a couple hundred hours filming, editing, and releasing over 20 videos
• These 2 open-source applications & community that represents everything that I stand for. For over a year, I’ve been working on using technology to reduce the barrier to human connection. I started off with building an app called Exo that helps people have better conversations with their partners and friends. Then nine months ago, I started working on another app that aims to fight loneliness in university.
• I’m also a recovering socially anxious person who struggled to value themselves and deeply bond with people. This mindset impacted every area of my life. Thankfully, through learning and continuous trial & error, I learned so much about human nature. Now I want to share that wisdom with the world through content like YouTube videos and tech like apps.
• Some people recommended me to build a community of people who aligned with my life mission and would like to be a part of it. So I decided to start a discord community where people are free to talk to like-minded people and provide feedback as we continue iterating and improving on the app. One month into growing this discord server, we grew to 120 members.
• I plan to start a university club this coming fall semester that would bring us people who strive to make friends through uncomfortable acts together.
• I’ve gotten a lot of support from peers and university staff over the last few weeks. Several news reporters reached out for video interviews and articles. https://news.ucalgary.ca/news/ucalgary-student-developing-app-help-foster-student-friendships is the only one that was published but LiveWire will be soon releasing it’s version too.
• Thanks to that new found publicity, I’ve been getting approached by several people and organisations to potentially collaborate to create a bigger impact together.
• You can find all the other cool things I’ve built over the years in my GitHub: https://github.com/psycho-baller

As a student entrepreneur, indicate the following information with respect to your business:  Company name; year founded; services offered; time commitment required; proprietor name(s).

Orbit; Sept 2024; Removing the barriers to human connection; 300 hours programming the mobile application, 20+ hours researching, 15+ interviewing, 25+ operations/managing, 40+ marketing. Exo; Dec 2023; have better and more meaningful conversations with your close ones; 400+ hours programming mobile app; 10+ hours researching, 10+ hours interviewing, 10+ operations/managing. YouTuber; 2023; inspiring people to discover and reach their fullest potential and share the wisdom I have so that other people facing the same problem don’t have to go through that struggle (e.g. used to struggle with social anxiety, learned to overcome it. Now I strive to help everyone struggling with it)

My activities include leadership roles. I will list up to three activities showing significant leadership and initiative over the past three years. I will describe the impact I made and state the number of hours I contributed for each activity.

1: Orbit

• I am the founder & CEO of Orbit. It started as a group project of 7 people. I learned so much during my time being the leader of this team. I had to always take initiative and be proactive in addressing any challenges that arose, as well as managing and delegating tasks effectively. It has taught me so much about what it takes to manage a large team who all have different motivations, passions, and availability. I could have just built my app by myself but I chose to build a team and found Orbit as a group project. This decision was heavily motivated by the fact that I’m building a social app that is intended to be used by a diverse group of people from all around the world. So it’s critical to get people from different perspectives and experiences into the project. My leadership style was heavily influenced by a book I read called “That Will Never Work” by Marc Randolph. In it, the author talks about his experience as a co-founder of Netflix and how he and Reed Hastings made sure to maintain the culture they were able to grow within Netflix. This has been my guiding light for my leadership style as it relates to Orbit. I tried to make sure that people enjoyed working on the project and always reminded them of the impact that we will be creating with this app. 2: YouTuber:
• I had to manage myself in some way because there are several steps you need to take before you can publish a successful video.
• in addition to that, I was juggling a full-time course load and leading a startup.
• I believe that one of the biggest things I’ve learned and gotten better at over the past 3 years of being a university student juggling several passions was time-management.
• learning how to manage your time is one of the most important skills to strengthen, especially during your youth
  • it’s the only thing in life that is finite for everyone (at least for now)
  • the earlier you master it, the more benefits you reap out of it

What program have you chosen to study at the University of Calgary? Why? Describe your future career goals.

• I have chosen Computer Science because it mixes the 2 biggest l and most important skills in my life: discovering problems and solving problems. These are the 2 core pillars of launching a startup/business
• my current mission is to continue working on Orbit or potentially joining forces with another startup that aligns with my life purpose. If I’m unable to find another startup, I will just continue pursuing Orbit
• I will also continue to create video content that educate and inspire people to live more meaningful lives. Especially in university where you get to drastically influence the trajectory of your life.