By Madison Forrest
Boston University News Service
Alexis Ward, a recent Boston University graduate, was in her last semester of her final year, standing in front of her 30 person classroom. She had proposed a centralized platform where students could browse and see affordable services that other students on campus were offering. Ward’s professor Sharon Topper, whom she maintains a relationship with post-grad, asked the class, “How many of you would download this?” Everyone in the class raised their hand.
When Ward started college, she was stressed out because she had no clue how to do her hair. “I really quickly blew through all of my money just by getting blowouts every week,” she said. The hair salon Ward frequented would cost her nearly $100 — far too expensive for a college student, she said.
Students were doing manicures and spray tans on campus, Ward had heard. That’s when Ward began to wonder if there could be an app or platform student-run businesses could offer their services. “This was something that I’d always had just in the back of my mind,” she said. “‘Oh, I wish this existed.’”
After graduating from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business in 2025, Ward began working on her passion project. The reassurance from her senior class assignment motivated her to found a business and make the Campus Collective App live on Jan. 27.
Ward posted on BU Connects once she had refined the business plan, business model and how she wanted to shape the marketing — all she was missing was someone with an engineering or technology background to apply Ward’s idea and create an application. Wendy Zhang, a masters student at BU, reached out to Ward. “Wendy’s really helped me to bring this whole idea to life,” Ward said.
Stella Makay, a sophomore studying biology and an ambassador for Campus Collective, is a nail artist who offers her services to BU students through Campus Collective. “This is exactly what I was looking for as a transfer student, or as someone who wanted to jumpstart their business at a new school,” Makay said.
Maykay loved this resource as she did not know anybody at BU prior to transferring — she soon applied to be an ambassador. “I really can see it [Campus Collective] going far,” she said.
“I never for a second doubted the possibility of Campus Collective because so many students around me were pursuing and starting things,” Ward said. She would go to the Starbucks in Questrom during her time at BU and remembers hearing people checking how their side hustles were going on their phones and computers.
Ward also felt inspired by how many of her classmates and fellow alumni went on to make their own businesses after attending her university. “I feel like a lot of people at BU had the ambition and the drive to start something, and I feel like this mindset was around me during all four years there,” she said.