Penn State Grad Launches App to Connect Minority Communities at Penn State

December 4, 2020 | Jada Pender

STATE COLLEGE — As a school that has over 40,000 students, Penn State can be difficult to
navigate for some. To cut down on the chaos of maneuvering this large school Joel Sakyi has
come up with a way to allow underrepresented groups to connect more easily.

As a “sleeping giant,” according to Gary Abdullah, Sakyi was the quiet kid with a great deal of
potential. With his work on Vybrnt he began to tap into that potential. 

Being a out of state African American student from Maryland, Sakyi felt as though there weren’t
many places were he felt like he belonged at Penn State. Once he joined the organization
BLUEPRINT, a mentoring program for first year and transfer students, he found his safe place
on campus.

Sakyi acknowledges that not every student is afforded this same opportunity and that lead to his
creation of his app, Vybrnt.

“I wanted to make a solution that could connect people with more resources, opportunities,
mentors and student organizations on a level that was more scalable,” Sakyi said.

Vybrnt is a company who’s main goal is to support underrepresented college students and help
them reach their full potential. Sakyi hopes that the app will allow these students to connect with
potential mentors and other opportunities offered by the university.
Sakyi’s solution to accomplish this is a social networking platform that gives spaces for Penn
State staff, students, and organizations to post events. It will allow students to see all that Penn
State has to offer in terms of organizations and clubs right at the tip of their fingers.

“I thought that having a integrated social network would be the best way for students who are
new to the community and students who have been here for a while to engage with each other
and find out what’s been happening on campus.” Sakyi said.

After bringing the idea to Dr. Jason Gines, the Assistant Dean in the Office of Inclusion and
Diversity Engagement in the College of IST, Sakyi didn’t stop there, he too it upon himself and
began to learn how to code during his summer break.

“…what I didn’t know was that Joel was going to go home and teach himself how to code, code
the app himself, and then by the next time I spoke to him, he had advanced it so far,” Gines
recalled.

After coming back to school for the fall semester Sakyi was determined not to lose his
momentum and continue to develop the app even while taking a full load of undergraduate
classes.

Fortunately for Sakyi his work with Vybrnt was falling in line with some of his IST classes and
he was even able to code for the app as a class assignment.

After months of work on the app, Sakyi and his team were on track to begin test trials with
student in April 2020. Unfortunately like many people’s plans, the plans for Vybrnt were put on
hold once the pandemic hit.

“We had to struggle a lot with just keeping communication…making sure we have a clear goal
and direction,” Sakyi said.

But even with that setback Sakyi continued to persevere and adjust, changing from weekly in
person meeting to work on the app development to weekly zoom meetings.

The pandemic may have slowed things slightly but not completely. Friends of Sakyi saw this
determination to overcome this pandemic and not let it hurt his work on Vybrnt.

“Joel’s a trustworthy person, very go-getting, building an app is very difficult but he kept going.
He’s very resilient,” Tiffany Bass (junior, Security Risk Analysis) said.

Abdullah sees Vybrnt as an app that has the potential to allow people to interact with each other
in a more organized way. He also says that the app will be able to introduce students to
organizations at Penn State that they might not have even known about.

“Once life returns to some form of normalcy, Vybrnt has the opportunity to really do a couple of
things,” Gary Abdullah said.

While the app would benefit the Penn State community in terms of connecting students, many
see the potential of the app to benefit other schools as well.
“Vybrnt is that technological advancement for students of color in a safe and brave space to put
things in place,” Gines said.

This space could be created at numerous schools advancing beyond Penn State. While Sakyi
hasn’t announced any plans to expand Vybrnt to other universities, the potential is there.

For now, Penn State students can download the app in the Apple App Store or the Google Play
Store. The app currently has several organizations ranging from Queer and Trans People of
Color, QTPOC, to Penn State Climate Action.

The app is continuing to update and add more organizations to give every student an
organization that they can identify with.

The ‘sleeping giant’ that Abdullah describes Sakyi as, is awakening and many people are all
looking forward to see what else Sakyi will do in terms of Vybrnt and his career endeavors.