VisPath

Claremont Accelerator Hackathon

An AI-powered DMV and US ID preparation web app built for international students and new U.S. residents — a personalized, step-by-step action plan based on your exact visa situation, location, and requirements.

Context

Every person on this team had personally run into the wall. Marcel spent three hours at the NJ DMV validating written test results. Sophie, as an international student, navigated a system that was never designed with her situation in mind. Miya dealt with parallel parking requirements in Delaware, only to find that California, where she was going to college, has completely different rules. I ended up getting my license almost a year later than planned because of scheduling and documentation confusion. Our hackathon prompt was to tackle a broader industry and societal problem, so we chose this one.

Problem

1.58 million students with zero personalized guidance. International students contributed $43.8B to the U.S. economy in 2023–24, yet there is no official DMV guide for non-citizens. The rules are deeply situation-specific, but the resources aren’t.

License renewal frequency alone ranges from every 3 months to every year depending on where you’re from. REAL ID validity expires with your visa. SEVIS must be active 10+ days before applying. SSA denial risk is real and opaque. What gets you approved in California gets you rejected in New York — no single resource maps your visa type to your state to your exact document set. Students resort to fragmented communities like r/dmvlosangeles, crowdsourcing which office has the easiest test.

“It’s difficult because it’s one of those ‘first’ experiences that domestic students can rely on their parents for… but I can’t.” — CMC ’26, international student

Solution

Personalized action plan, not generic advice. VisPath takes your exact situation as input and outputs a precise, ordered action plan with zero ambiguity. The North Star: you should never walk into a DMV or any other building unsure of what you need or whether you’re ready.

Key Decisions

Local data storage, not cloud-synced profiles. Immigration status data is among the most sensitive information a person can share. Storing the intake profile locally wasn’t just a technical shortcut.

Next steps ranked by urgency, not alphabetically. VisPath surfaces requirements ranked by urgency given your specific timeline — OPT expiration, job start date, enrollment status. Sequencing is an equal part of the value, not just the information.

State-level logic from day one. Building state-specific requirement cross-referencing into the MVP rather than deferring it was a deliberate scope call, since “go to the DMV with these documents” is only useful if those documents are actually correct for the right state.

What’s Next

• Expanding state coverage beyond the initial five. CA, TX, NY, IL, and MA cover a large portion of the international student population, but states like Florida and Washington have different edge cases to consider.
• Partnering with international student offices. ISO advisors are already fielding these questions manually — VisPath could be the tool they hand to every incoming F-1 student during orientation.

Takeaways

1. Personal frustration is valid product research. We brainstormed by recalling frustrations we and people we knew had faced personally. That founder-problem fit gave us faster, sharper problem framing than any survey would have.
2. Complexity in the backend creates simplicity on the frontend. The 5-rule engine and state-specific cross-referencing are genuinely complicated to build, but that complexity is exactly what lets the user face a clean, ranked action list.