As a student, finding relaxation can be difficult, especially at an often stress-filled place like Georgetown. Students have created a new app to help: Ascend Meditations.
Ascend is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered meditation app that creates unique meditation experiences for each of its users through its various personalization features. Georgetown students Hampton Tanner (CAS ’25), Colin Graydon (CAS ’24), and Gordon Grandbouche (CAS ’27) founded the app along with Walker Ferguson, a senior at Wake Forest University.
Tanner said that he got into meditation in the summer of 2023 because of all the changes happening in his life: Tanner is a transfer from Wake Forest, so coming to Georgetown in fall 2023, he was in a new place and new school while also dealing with changes in his own family. These changes all led him towards meditation.
“There’s a lot going on, so I needed something that would provide me a way to kind of monitor my thoughts and manage my thoughts and manage myself,” Tanner said. “I realized very quickly how powerful it is for myself. And outside of academics, I found it very beneficial in athletics. I found it very beneficial in relationships, friendships.”
After about eight months of meditating, Tanner came up with the idea for Ascend in February 2024. One question guided him when creating the app.
“What if somebody blended the ancient traditional practices of meditation and spirituality with the new age of technology and artificial intelligence?” Tanner asked.
The main feature of the app is personalized meditations. Users input what’s on their mind or something they want to overcome and the app creates a meditation specifically for them. Users can also customize many features of the app, such as the voice guiding the meditation.
“For example, a user could say, ‘I have a class presentation tomorrow. I’m feeling very anxious. I don’t like speaking in front of other people, and I just don’t know if I know what I need to know. Help me visualize myself giving this presentation. Help me, through this meditation, come back down to Earth, ease these anxieties I have leading up to it,’” Tanner said.
Tanner is also on the football team at Georgetown and believes that this app can help student athletes when they’re competing.
“Say you have a big sport competition, you’re a quarterback or a pitcher, and you’re feeling a little bit anxious about your game, you know, it’s your first collegiate start—you can have a meditation created specific to your situation, to your position, to help you visualize yourself succeeding with confidence, with ease, and moving just as you’d like to move,” Tanner said.
Users can also create their own meditation plans. Meditation plans consist of a specific number of phases that build on each other to ultimately reach a goal, such as reducing anxiety.
“These are four-phase meditation plans where each phase has three to four meditations and they’re working towards a goal. Phase two will build on phase one, phase three will build on phase two,” Tanner said. “These are just more comprehensive plans that go over two to three weeks to help people who have a specific goal in mind really be best prepared over time.”
The app also includes a sleep stories feature. Tanner said that through their market research, he and the other co-founders saw that other meditation apps were very popular for sleep. By combining sleep stories with AI, Ascend gives users a unique story to listen to before going to bed.
“Using the same system of processing with AI, we allow users to create their own unique sleep story. They can pick their genre, so if they want a romance, if they want a thriller, a mystery, they could pick that,” Tanner said. “If they wanted a beach, they wanted even their hometown, a forest, a lake, they could pick that, and they can even name their characters if they’d like. Then a story we created on their inputs will essentially guide them through a sleep story that they uniquely created.”
Though many meditation apps exist on the market, Tanner believes that what makes Ascend unique is how much personalization comes with it. Users cater their meditation experience to what they want or need in the moment.
“The other meditation apps on the market, they’re fantastic, however, they don’t have that level of personalization that comes with AI. So say you’re looking for a meditation to destress. Well, you’ll be able to find meditations to destress. However, with Ascend, you can have a meditation created to destress about specifically what’s stressing you out,” Tanner said.
Tanner sees this app as an opportunity to target groups of people who tend to be under a lot of stress, including student athletes like himself.
“We’re targeting high performers, specifically student athletes, students, and then high-performing jobs,” Tanner said.
The app is free for limited use, which includes three meditations per week. Subscribers receive unlimited meditations. Tanner and the other co-founders are also working with different universities and athletic programs to give students access to the app.
“We’re really diving into athletics. We’re working with different universities across the country who we’re very close to closing deals where we’ll give all their student athletes access to the app,” Tanner said. “In the long-term vision, we also want to get into universities, outside of just athletic departments, actual universities, to give the whole student body free access to the app.”
Ascend was created by students, for students. The co-founders hope their app will be a valuable resource for their peers.
“All of us who created the app are students,” Tanner said. “We see firsthand just how imperative it is to give these resources to students.”
At Georgetown, Tanner sees this app as an important tool that students can use to help with their mental health and well-being.
“We all know how important mental health is, and especially students at such a high-performing place like Georgetown, everyone’s constantly competing both with other people and themselves,” Tanner said. “I see this app giving these students an opportunity to step away from the noise and to find a sense of calmness and peace and clarity.”
