BearCentral

Resources by Cal Students, For Cal Students. A convenient website that helps Berkeley students fully utilize all the resources available to them because the vast web may be hard to navigate sometimes.

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Inspiration

As Cal students, we've experienced the difficulties of trying to adapt to this new environment. Though there are many resources on the web, we were either unaware of many, or unable to effectively navigate through them. Therefore, we decided to create a website that centralizes many of the key resources UC Berkeley students may seek out, thus, providing Cal students with a platform where they can feel better prepared and confident in succeeding at this school.

What it does

BearCentral has a few key features. For one, it compiles many of the useful links students may want to view all in on easy-to-navigate page. The website also provides students with a platform to connect to others in their classes through class-specific forums. Students can also communicate through the mentors feature, where veteran bears can apply to be a mentor, and new bears can gain advice from others. Lastly, the website comes with a marketplace feature, where students are able to buy and sell college-related products.

How we built it

The website is created through neocities, which is a web-hosting service. The site was created mainly using html and css, with javascript functionalities integrated.

Challenges we ran into

Many of us were unfamiliar with web development and back-end development, so the whole thing was a learning process. Ultimately, we were able to develop our skills and still create a working prototype of our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud of having a semi-functional product in such a short period of time. We were most proud of how each of our individual contributions were able to come together to create a stylistically uniform site.

What we learned

What appeared to be a daunting task at the beginning of the day, ended up becoming an exponential learning curve for us all. Along with the workshops, we were also able to learn a lot from each other.

What's next for BearCentral

There are many features we would still like to see developed for BearCentral, namely we'd want to improve and refine the mentoring system of the website. In addition to this, we would like to see this site potentially expand to other UCs and other universities.

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