FacultyTrack – Smart Faculty Availability System

Faculties List
Admin Login
Faculty Login
Request for meeting
Search by name
Student Login
Faculty Dashboard
Faculty Profile
Home page
Admin Dashboard

Inspiration

Picture this: a student walks across campus to meet a professor. The cabin is empty. They wait, ask around, wait again — only to learn the professor was teaching two floors up the entire time.

Now multiply that by hundreds of students and dozens of faculty, every single day. It's wasted time and constant friction that everyone just accepts as normal. Calling isn't a real fix either — phones are on silent, teachers can't answer mid-class, and repeated calls only add to the disruption.

So we asked: what if finding a faculty member felt as easy as checking if a friend is online? That question became FacultyTrack.

What it does

FacultyTrack turns a frustrating physical guessing game into a two-second lookup. A student searches any faculty member by name or department and instantly sees:

Live status — Available, In Class, In Meeting, Department Work, On Leave, or Other
Current location — shown with respect for faculty privacy
Expected free time — the real question: is it worth waiting?
Today's full schedule at a glance
Request a Meeting — pick a reason and an open slot; faculty can accept, reject, or reschedule

Three connected roles:

Student — search, view live status/location/schedule, request meetings without a phone call
Faculty — log in, view schedule, override status when real life doesn't match the timetable
Admin — manage faculty, departments, timetables, and system-wide activity

How we built it

Faculty shouldn't have to think about this. Instead of manual hourly updates, the system reads the current time against their timetable and computes status automatically:

Default Timetable → Current Time → Automatic Status → Manual Override? → Status shown to student

Real life rarely follows the plan, though, so a manual override always takes priority over the timetable for that window, then quietly reverts once it expires.

Tech stack: HTML, CSS, JavaScript frontend; lightweight Flask backend; MySQL/SQLite for faculty, departments, timetables, status, and meeting requests.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing automation with human control, so the timetable never overrides a faculty member's manual update
Deciding how much location detail is too much — we built in a privacy layer so faculty can show a general area instead of an exact room
Resisting the urge to build every feature at once, and scoping a focused, usable V1

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An auto-status engine that removes almost all manual effort from faculty
A working three-role system that mirrors how a real college actually functions
Designing privacy into the core of the product, not as an afterthought

What we learned

How to model time-aware state — timetables, live status, and temporary overrides — reliably
That a "small," everyday annoyance can have outsized impact at scale
How to scope an ambitious idea into a strong, shippable first version