We built this for fun,
because we needed it ourselves.
We are Alibek Ussipbayev and Kirill Kim. In our final year at the Nazarbayev Intellectual School of Physics and Mathematics in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, we realized every guide for high school students was either stale, paywalled, or written for someone else. Compass is the tool we wished had existed on day one.
Two high schoolers. Zero corporate pitch.
One stubborn rule.
In the spring of eleventh grade in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, we watched classmates pay $80 to submit applications to contests that had expired three years earlier. We did not incorporate, we raised zero funding, and we carry no corporate titles. We just refused to let predatory paywalls dictate where students from our region could go.
Alibek Ussipbayev
“If an algorithm has to guess when a deadline is, that algorithm belongs in the trash. We wrote scrapers to ping the university’s actual servers and break our build the instant a link rots.”
The biggest lie in student guidance is the recommendation black box. Most platforms quietly harvest GPAs, sell contact lists to private test-prep mills, and use algorithms that push whatever university bought a sponsored slot.
In Compass, every plan lives exclusively in your browser’s localStorage. No telemetry tracks your ambitions. If an organizer moves an application date or a link rots, our automated GitHub watchdog fails our deployment before any student can be misled.
Kirill Kim
“We spent weekends calling competition committees from Almaty to Geneva to confirm whether high schoolers from Kazakhstan were genuinely eligible. If the organizers gave vague answers, we marked it unverified.”
We lost count of how many 'free' international olympiads turned out to be traps: free to register, but $120 to download the completion certificate required for scholarship applications.
We called coordinators directly, cross-referenced eligibility clauses in fine print, and established rule zero: if an opportunity hides its real cost or hasn't announced its current cycle dates, we refuse to pretend otherwise.
The Journey Through NIS PhM Shymkent
The Wall of Expired Deadlines
When searching for opportunities felt like wading through digital landfill.
At NIS Shymkent, we set out to find international science olympiads, research grants, and pre-college summer programs. What we found instead was an ecosystem of predatory blogs charging $80 for submissions, copying 2021 deadlines, and treating Central Asian students as completely invisible.
- Catalog sites claiming to be 'free' demanded $80 to submit or $120 to download the completion certificate required for scholarship packets.
- Stale deadlines copied from 2021 that had expired three years earlier were presented as live competitions.
- Over 90% of indexed lists were authored for US college graduates, leaving Central Asian high schoolers completely ignored.
“We are still in school uniform. That is not a corporate credential, but it is our greatest asset: we were the students drowning in bad information before we became the people making Compass to fix it.”
What we refuse to do.
The internet is flooded with predatory guidance tools. Here are the four compromises we will never make.
We never rank universities
League table rankings rot in twelve months and flatten a multidimensional human life into a single scalar. We map criteria, costs, and faculty strengths—not arbitrary prestige numbers.
Free means end-to-end
“Free to learn, $99 for the certificate” has its own explicit tag. Compass itself is completely free with no paid tiers, and we never disguise fees behind fine print.
No silent filtering
If we do not know your GPA or test scores, you still see every opportunity with an honest eligibility note—we never quietly erase opportunities behind closed algorithms.
No personality horoscopes
We observe your concrete interests and deliberate choices. We will never hand you a four-letter personality type, because we cannot make that claim with scientific honesty.
What is on the site.
Three interconnected engines built to turn ambiguity into a concrete, executable plan.
The Opportunities Engine
192 verified entries. Our entire platform is 100% free to use, with no hidden paywalls. 58 are open whenever you are ready—self-paced courses, journals, and open challenges.
The Academic Guide
Bridges 33 career areas with 44 academic disciplines across 17 countries and 38 university hubs worldwide.
The Private Plan
An agenda, a personal Kanban board, and interactive mind maps for structuring decisions. Everything is stored locally on your device—strictly private to you.
How we check a date.
A countdown on Compass only appears when we have verified that date against the organizer’s official portal for the current cycle.
Primary Source Only
We never scrape secondary aggregators. Every single link points directly to the institution or competition committee.
Current Cycle Proof
If 2026 dates have not been posted, we state “Dates not announced yet”. We would rather look empty than mislead you.
Automated CI Watchdog
Every link on Compass is automatically tested on a recurring schedule. A dead link or redirect loop immediately breaks our build.
Verified Partner Badges
When a university or hub posts directly, a verification tick confirms identity—it is never an endorsement or paid ranking.
Staying is an answer.
Leaving is not the default here. Compass maps 6 pathways that require no foreign visa, no relocation, and no foreign exchange risk.
The mistake is treating staying as a concession. The students who thrive from Central Asia often choose an exceptional local undergraduate degree deliberately—graduating debt-free with proven research before stepping into a fully funded master’s abroad.
Direct line to Alibek & Kirill
Found a dead link? A date that moved? An eligibility rule that was misunderstood? That is the single most valuable message you can send us.
Zero Surveillance Guarantee
We strip referral codes and query tokens before logging page visits. We do not sell user lists or profile high school students for advertising brokers.
Not sure what to do with your future?
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