From Learning to Building: An Undergraduate’s Journey of Turning Ideas into Solutions?

During COVID-19, even before joining Ahmedabad University, Freya Sanghvi was already exploring ways to make learning more engaging. She created activity boxes for preschoolers that made learning fun and interactive. It helped her understand the value of experiential learning alongside traditional education. That interest eventually led her to Ahmedabad University, where she is pursuing a BBA (Hons) in Business Analytics, and later to the University of Vaasa, Finland, for a semester exchange programme.

Asked why she chose Finland, she said, “I wanted to understand what made the Finnish education system so highly regarded. Once there, I found that the system placed considerable emphasis on students attempting unfamiliar tasks, learning through experience, and being evaluated on how they applied their learning, rather than simply on examinations. This aligned closely with my interest in experiential education.”

At Vaasa, her courses were similarly hands-on. She worked with a company on a content marketing project, collaborated with students from a university in Peru on sustainable trade, and worked with SAP on an ERP project where the team’s work had real consequences for the assigned company.

Her biggest learning experience, however, came through her work with Professor Emmanuel Ndzibah at the University of Vaasa. The professor approached Freya about the issue of companies submitting real-world business challenges to the university, which are then converted into thesis topics for Master’s and PhD students. The professor was manually refining each problem, assigning topics and supervisors, and tracking progress, often managing around 200 email threads at a time. He initially suggested building a dashboard to make the process more efficient.

Freya took the idea a step further. She first studied his existing workflow before proposing a web portal to consolidate the entire process on a single platform. Companies could submit problems directly, which the portal converted into structured thesis topics using Claude API. Students could browse and select topics, while the professor could approve them, assign supervisors, and track progress.

Processes previously managed through hundreds of emails and spreadsheets were brought into a single system. What began as an unpaid project eventually became a commissioned project worth EUR 2,100.

The project also led to further opportunities with the professor. Freya is now developing an analysis dashboard to help him centralise and visualise his work. The professor, originally from Ghana, also introduced her to an education challenge in his home country, where many students lack access to schools, while existing online platforms remain expensive and inaccessible.

Together, they developed a mobile learning platform aimed initially at students in Grades 5–7. The platform brings lessons, videos, activities, quizzes, teacher communication, and other learning resources into one place.

“The platform is being designed as an affordable alternative to existing learning-management systems, which may be too expensive or complicated for schools in Ghana. The objective is not to build a large commercial platform, but to create an accessible and affordable learning solution for these schools,” said Freya.

Freya credits both her mother and the pedagogy at Ahmedabad University for her success. Her mother’s journey in education and her work in developing engaging learning solutions exposed Freya to the world of education and the importance of making learning more accessible from an early age.

Her interest in technology and website development was further shaped by Ahmedabad University’s Foundation Programme. She had never built a website before, but the programme introduced her to the basics of website creation and sparked her curiosity to explore further. She subsequently taught herself Python and progressed from building a basic website to developing more sophisticated portals.

Her progression reflects a continuous drive for experimentation, self-learning, and practical application. Beginning with simple activity boxes and a website developed during her Neighbourhoods Studio—part of the University’s Foundation Programme—she has since advanced to building a functional university portal and engineering digital learning solutions.