Classmate: Hackathon Submission Story

Inspiration

As students ourselves, we constantly saw peers struggling to get reliable academic help — especially when it came to finding someone who actually took the same course, with the same prof. Most students rely on Discord servers, Reddit, or word-of-mouth — all of which are scattered, unmoderated, and unreliable.

We realized: academic success isn’t about working harder. It’s about having the right support network. That insight drove us to build Classmate — a peer-powered academic support platform where students can find trusted tutors, verified reviews, and connect with others in the exact courses they’re taking.

What it does

Classmate allows students to:

Browse and follow courses offered at their university
View verified tutors who have taken that course before
Read/write reviews and ratings for tutors and professors
Book and pay for tutoring sessions directly on the platform
Apply to become a tutor, upload transcripts, and manage availability
Automatically send confirmation emails and manage scheduling

Admins can:

Approve or reject new course, professor, and tutor submissions
Ensure platform quality, integrity, and review trustworthiness

How we built it

We built Classmate using:

Next.js + TypeScript for the front end
Firebase Firestore for user and course data
Stripe for secure payments and refund handling
AWS S3 for storing tutor transcript uploads
Nodemailer to send booking and cancellation emails
Tailwind CSS for a clean and responsive UI
React Big Calendar to power tutor availability and session management

We prioritized building a modular, scalable file structure so we could easily expand features while keeping the UX consistent.

Challenges we ran into

Building a scalable calendar system for real-time session management took time — we had to prevent double bookings, calculate dynamic pricing, and integrate it cleanly with the UI.
Stripe integration and refunds required in-depth understanding of session metadata and error-proofing.
Email handling via Nodemailer and Gmail authentication was more complex than expected — ensuring delivery and formatting was a learning curve.
Structuring Firestore cleanly to support nested relationships (courses → professors → tutors) took iterations.