Years In The Making, Hypr Celebrates…Part 1

In September of 2018, two young medical students decided to venture into the tutoring business at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus. The partners, Devon Malcolm Brewster & Seon Hayles, set out on a mission to bring quality medical tutoring to students of the UWI Mona.

They summed up their mission as wanting to offer students the best options for academic guidance at the lowest cost while also creating an avenue for other students to earn a decent income. They achieved this semester after semester as more students sang the praises of this team of dedicated students rooting for and facilitating their success through this great initiative. It wasn’t before long that they chanced after partnerships that expanded their portfolio to include the sale of medical textbooks, lab coats, hard drives and other essentials for any pre-clinical medical or dental student.

Months into operation, after Seon had long sold his stake in the business, Devon pursued growth through this venture, inviting the toil of even more energetic and enthusiastic student tutors. With the burden of juggling clinical medical training and running this labour-intensive business, things started to look a bit dismal to the point of near closure—then the pandemic struck.

For many businesses, COVID-19 relegated them to stagnation and even closure, but not so for HyperAcademics. Innovation and willpower guided the organization into a new era of online tutoring, unlike anything anyone had done before in the small market at UWI Mona. Strategic partnerships with a team of three intelligent young men, Owen Hyatt, Eric Dixon and Xavier Brown, and the first medical doctor to join the team of tutors, Dr Rochelle Smith, catapulted HyperAcademics into a revolutionary force to be reckoned with.

Devon built HyperAcademics’ website, the host of its new learning management platform, with no coding knowledge; only the help of YouTube. The team decided to adopt a low-cost model, dropping prices up to nearly 70% below the norm so that more students to access these premium resources at a time, in a pandemic, where many students were lost in the wind with regards to surviving medical education from their homes.

The successes of this new pandemic era drove motivation into Devon and his team, thus initiating the idea of upgrading HyperAcademics from a sole trader business to a limited liability company. In pursuit of this, on July 16, 2020, HyperAcademics Jamaica Limited was born. Rebranded simply as Hypr, this new company set out to achieve strategic targets to propel its profitability forward while remaining true to its foundational principles of relentlessly pursuing students’ success.

To be continued…