Meet Gaurav Kukreja, 21 — a student and the man behind a fully functional medical emergency app called Fast Aid, built in just 13 days. His life would not have been the same without the Mac. A 2025 Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winner, he presented his app to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Today, he is as much an entrepreneur as he is a student. His story is one of several captured in Apple’s latest chapter of its campaign, Great Ideas Start Here, which celebrates the spirit of independence and opportunity the Mac brings to student lives.
“When I started building my app, I had a 13-day deadline. I didn’t know how to code… but working through one problem at a time, you can quickly grow your idea into something that no one sees the blemishes of. They just see something truly meaningful,” says Kukreja in the campaign.
Entrepreneurially minded students would do well to know that ambitions rarely go unchallenged. Dismissiveness is par for the course. Trudge on they must.
The Mac has long been a tool for students taking career-defining leaps. Take Ananya Kulshrestha, 20, founder of Mellovia. “Nothing great started as great,” she says in her film. “When you are in college and you are starting on a million new things, it is going to get a little messy. But the thing you should remember is this — as a student, you have the freedom to embarrass yourself. In fact, that’s when you are most likely to surprise yourself.”
At the heart of the short film series are the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. MacBook Air offers outstanding performance and top-drawer battery life, and now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB, Wi-Fi 7, and more — all in a thin, light, and durable all-aluminium design. The latest MacBook Air with M5 features a faster CPU and next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, enabling it to power through everything from creative projects to complex AI tasks. MacBook Pro, meanwhile, remains the world’s best pro laptop, delivering game-changing performance and AI capabilities.
The idea is not lost on Kabeer Malhotra, 20, founder of Flowpay. “One day I am writing code and the next 20 days I am fixing that code. And on some days I am just a student trying to get his microeconomics homework done on time.”
At the core of these films are shining examples of creativity, innovation, and the opportunities that technology makes possible. The entrepreneur revolution is well and truly under way, with a surge of new businesses bringing real-world innovations to life.
Worth keeping an eye on, too, is Apple’s annual Swift Student Challenge, which invites students from across the globe to bring their ideas to life through original app playgrounds built with Apple’s Swift coding language. The Challenge has given thousands of student developers the opportunity to showcase their creativity, demonstrate their coding abilities, and build real-world skills to carry into their careers and beyond.
The new chapter of Great Ideas Start Here is already live across digital and social channels in a mix of 30-second films, with longer 90-second YouTube stories rolling out through the back-to-school season.
College, at its best, is a room full of people who refuse to think small. Choose your people wisely; they tend to become your collaborators, your co-founders, and your competition.