ANAHEIM, Calif.  – Senior year hasn’t been a picture perfect send off to college for Alexa Velasquez. Like most schools in Southern California, Orange Lutheran High School decided to continue classes online during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“It’s sad that we, kind of, don’t have the last couple months that we’d be together. A lot of my friends are going kind of far,” Alexa said.

Normally, Spring and Summer are peak times for high school seniors to visit college campuses before students make their decision. But recent campus closures have forced her to view most of her top three schools online.

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“Luckily, I was able to do a campus tour of [UC] Davis before any of this ever happened. But otherwise, I probably would’ve liked to have visited Northeastern [University], maybe, and probably, definitely, UC San Diego,” Alexa said.

As university and college campuses also turned to online classes, Velasquez gained some quality time with her brother JP Velasquez, a student at the University of Southern California.

With both siblings under one roof, Alexa began to ask her brother about college, housing and how to pick the right classes. Those conversations helped JP and his friend Christian Yeghnazar realize that other high school students might also have similar questions without a clear way to find answers. So, the two created College Connect, an online platform that connects high school students' questions with over 250 college students from over 50 universities.

“I hope this takes some stress out of the whole process of going to college and I hope that they are able to see just how someone is being a resource for them how they can pass it forward when the next wave of students are looking to go to college,” JP Velasquez said.

Alexa might not know what the end of her senior year will look like. But with the help of her brother, she’s choosing to spend her next four years as a design major at UC Davis.

“I would be a little bummed that I wouldn’t be able to have a graduation," Alexa said. "But, hopefully, I’ll have another one in another four years."

Until then, she’ll continue to pick her brother’s brain about college and enjoy the newfound quality time in quarantine before her freshman year.