It started with one student getting lost in Spanish paperwork.

Mengkoung arrived in Barcelona to start his bachelor’s at Harbour.Space carrying two suitcases, a student visa, and a vague idea that “there’s some paperwork to do.” Like most international students, he had never heard the word empadronamiento before.

He learned the hard way. To open a bank account, he needed empadronamiento. To book the TIE appointment, he needed empadronamiento plus several other documents he’d never come across. To even find an appointment slot, he had to refresh the cita previa page like it was a concert ticket.

He spent his first month piecing things together from scattered forums, WhatsApp groups, and friend-of-a-friend advice — each source helpful in its own way, but none of them giving the full picture in one place.

Renewal time. The Prórroga de Estudios. Mengkoung assumed he’d know what to do by now. He didn’t.

Different forms. Different offices. Small requirements that had quietly changed since the year before. He reached out to seniors at Harbour.Space who had been through their own renewals — and quickly noticed that every one of them was relying on their own private notes, screenshots, and memories. Generous people, sharing what they could, but each from a slightly different version of the journey.

Same process, figured out from scratch every September by every new batch. The information existed in dozens of heads — it just hadn’t been written down in one place.

Mengkoung sat down with seniors who’d already been through the process and carefully recorded what they wished they’d known on day one. He walked through each office himself, checked the official forms, and mapped the real sequence step by step.

UniMate is that work, made public. Every flow you see here is a process a real student walked through, got stuck on, and figured out — written down so the next student can move through it with a little more confidence.

If it saves you one Sunday night of confused googling, it has already done its job.