Sabih Bin Wasi, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Stellic

Providing a Roadmap to College

On their journey to a degree, a typical college student must process information from multiple institutional systems.

Interpreting it all can be difficult, especially for a teenager new to making such decisions on their own.

Changing, or even declaring, a major and understanding how to complete it is a complex process, and it’s not often user-friendly.

“It turns out you can't solve these problems well unless you truly understand the requirements,” says Sabih Bin Wasi (CMU 2015).

Sabih had great advisers at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar who guided him, and in the process, he saw how technology could help clarify the path through higher education. So he founded Stellic, along with fellow Tartans on the Rise Rukhsar Neyaz, Sabih’s wife, and Musab Popatia.

It’s a degree management tool that helps students, advisers, administrators and leaders in higher education collaborate with the goal of on-time graduation and career success.

Stellic draws disparate data from various university areas including student information systems, course catalogs and learning management systems — removing the manual work of building a degree plan for every possible major. Students and university faculty and staff get a visual interface to track progress, ensure all requirements are noted and understand the implications of decisions such as changing or adding a major.

Stellic is used at 70 colleges and universities globally, and its innovative approach landed Sabih and Rukhsar on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Education list in 2019.

CMU was Stellic’s first client, and the company’s moniker is a play on the name of one of Sabih’s computer science advisers and School of Computer Science University Teaching Professor Mark Stehlik.

“The help I got from people like Mark is baked into Stellic’s features today,” he says. “We had meaningful, impactful conversations with Mark and all of our advisers, and that’s been so relevant and valuable to what we’ve been able to accomplish so far, as well as what we expect to do in the future.”

Story by Elizabeth Speed