Uliana Ronska

I started Kudyvstupaty because Ukrainian students applying abroad usually have zero real information. University websites are in different languages, every country has its own weird rules, and no one at school knows how any of it actually works.

When I was 15, I had to cold-message friends of friends of friends just to understand basic things. Later, when I had easy access to people studying at top universities, I collected 85+ honest real acceptance stories and put everything in one place. It took a few days to build and a lot of annoying my friends, but it became exactly the resource I wish I had.

So far, it's helped 2,500+ Ukrainian students navigate applying abroad during a critical moment for Ukrainian education.

Accidentally ended up running Cambridge's largest hackathon.

Most hackathons felt corporate and boring, basically recruitment events with merch. I wanted to create something different, a weekend which students would spend building insane projects.

So together with James we ran CamHack 2025. We ran a slightly insane advertising campaign (including hiding 650 small rubber ducks around the university) and grew it from ~100 to 250+ participants.

30 hours of building genuinely unhinged projects under the theme "Unintended Behaviour". And it worked!!! The projects were weird, technically strong, and people actually cared.

Cambridge felt weirdly uncreative - everyone wrapped in deadlines, no space to just build something for fun. I couldn't find people who'd spend evenings making stuff just because.

So I started QUACK with James. It's a weekly, no-pressure build night where people just show up and work on whatever they're excited about.

~70 members total, around 30 show up weekly to work on AI tools, quantum projects, graphics engines, hardware builds, whatever catches their interest.

I secured sponsorship from HRT, Citadel Securities, Optiver and EF for hardware to allow students to build whatever they want.

I created my own language learning app for my friends to learn Ukrainian. I learnt German myself from scratch to B2 (upper intermediate) without any courses or classes - just a mix of different apps/websites/approaches.

I did not like any app, but I liked parts of many (at some point I had 24 apps installed on my phone - I wanted to experiment to find what worked for me).

So I built one place that combines spaced repetition (Anki-style), a chatbot to actually use the language, small games, and structured lessons - all sharing the same vocabulary, so you're not relearning the same words in five different apps.

Didn't want to pay for speech-to-text software. Asked Claude to build it for me. That's it.

Running this one this term with James - video games, board games, 48 hours of creation. February 27 - March 1, expecting around 300 people.