Involv

Inspiration

In a new environment, a friend is an utmost need for anyone. More than a friend, this person acts as a support and helps you make decisions in a relatively new environment. In my first semester, I felt out of place as I did not have someone who I could call a friend. Coming from India, I was settling in and hence I thought I could find friends in the fellow Indians. These so called friends, left me outside a hotel at 11pm during thanksgiving break. I had nowhere to live and had to somehow find myself a shelter for the four days of the trip. It was not until the start of this semester that a sophomore friend of mine motivated me to go to an info session of Class Office. I began participating more and more and a friend group started to grow.

What it does

It connects you to a mentor and updates you with the events he/she is attending. The mentor is able to communicate with each user in a live chat in order for the mentor to build a relationship with the user. From that seed, the app takes your interests and clubs to set up a calendar of events. It does this by suggesting events which are run by groups that have large amounts of overlap in members. This way, instead of _ only _ going to random events around the university that are of interest, the user is urged to spend time with a friend group that likely has similar interests.

How we built it

We created the back end (server) on JavaScript and Parse. Our User Interface and front end consisted of several technologies- Pug, Sass, jQuery, JavaScript, Html and Css

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges we ran into was translating our idea into a tech solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of being able to come up with and build a realistic solution. Given our problem, there were many possibilities that we could have taken to solve it. However, we are proud of how we were able to target the pain-point for college underclassmen so well.

What we learned

How to use live queries with parse. We learned the benefits of "agile development," or the development of the product with the demo in mind. This way, no matter what stage our project is at, we are always able to demo _ something _. This process boosts the overall team spirit and keeps us focused on just one goal at a time.