ClubHub

remark your calendar
Landing Page
Quiz
Dashboard

Inspiration

UTD has over 300 student organizations, but most students never find the ones that actually fit them. We were tired of scrolling through outdated flyers, hopping between Discords to find event dates, and manually cross-checking meeting times with our schedules. There had to be a smarter way. Club Hub was born from that frustration: a platform that does the work for you and marks your calendar with what actually matters.

What it does

Club Hub is a web platform exclusively for UT Dallas students that personalizes club and event discovery. Students take a 60-second onboarding quiz answering questions about their year, interests, goals, and availability. From there, Gemini AI cross-references their profile with real-time UTD club and event data from the Nebula Labs API to surface personalized recommendations. Students also receive a curated weekly newsletter with their top club matches and upcoming events.

How we built it

Frontend: React + Vite + Tailwind CSS
Backend: Node.js + Express
Authentication: Firebase
Database: Firebase Firestore
AI: Gemini API for club matching and personalized recommendations
Campus Data: Nebula Labs API for live club, event, and room scheduling data
Email: Resend for weekly newsletter delivery
RAG Pipeline: Embedded club descriptions using Gemini embeddings to retrieve the most relevant clubs before passing them to the model

Challenges we ran into

CORS issues between frontend and backend that behaved differently on Windows vs Mac
Firebase credential configuration across different machines during team collaboration
Handling Gemini API rate limits on the free tier during development
Parsing and cleaning Nebula API responses into structured data usable by the AI pipeline

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully functional end-to-end AI recommendation pipeline using real UTD campus data. Integrated live Nebula Labs endpoints so recommendations reflect what's actually happening on campus this week. Delivered a personalized weekly newsletter feature on top of the core quiz experience Shipped a working product under hackathon time pressure across a cross-platform team

What we learned

How to work with live third-party APIs and handle inconsistent or incomplete data The importance of environment configuration and CORS handling in collaborative dev environments How to scope features aggressively and ship what matters in a hackathon setting

What's next for ClubHub

In the future, we want to implement a smarter AI that automatically avoids class conflicts, prioritizes events based on each student’s past attendance records, and delivers personalized recommendations straight to their calendar. We also want to improve user experience by having a dark / light mode feature, Mobile-first UI or native mobile app, and calendar integrations (Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook).