myUIC App

Inspiration

Like every UIC student, we’ve had our fair share of struggles with the university portal, my.uic.edu, getting lost in a maze of menus and feeling frustrated from trying to use it on a mobile. It’s about time we ask, “Why on earth does it have to be this way?” That’s when it clicked: we could build something better. Something efficient. Something that actually makes student life, our life, easier.

What it does

To end all the frustration of UIC students, our team decided to take a step forward and make a change. We aim to transform, refine, and revolutionize our school's website into an IOS app. Our current university website is difficult to navigate, fails to highlight important information, and lacks optimization for our fellow mobile users. This makes our students and faculty's lives more frustrating than ever. With myUIC App, we are creating a platform, a bridge, that improves accessibility and communication for UIC people. Our app doesn’t just replicate my.uic.edu—it elevates it. Imagine having all the essential features plus everything you could ever need for university life. Interactive calendars? Need a Transcript? You name it! Students already have enough on their plates. myUIC App will modernize the student experience, making it faster, smarter, and more intuitive for the entire campus community so that students have one less thing to worry about.

How we built it

We built myUIC App using a scalable tech stack to ensure a convenient user experience. For the frontend, we use Reactnative, providing a dynamic and responsive interface optimized for mobile use. The backend is powered by Node.js and Express.js, enabling efficient data handling and smooth API interactions. This combination creates a fast, reliable and user-friendly platform that enhances campus services.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was the initial process of setting up. None of us had done any iOS development before and had ever used React. So, when we finished up our brainstorming and it was time to get hacking, we were very quickly humbled by our lack of understanding. But, we persevered and decided to not give up. This grueling my.uic portal had to be revamped and made simply better. So, through sheer grit and hate towards the my.uic website we powered through and decided to learn everything from scratch. The login page of the app was where we spent most of our time trying to understand what's going on, but after that, it was smooth sailing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of our login page, at first glance it might seem simple but to us it means a lot more. This was where we struggled but also learned the most. So, seeing the login page fully functioning represents more than a simple page but a manifestation of our hard work.

What we learned

We went from zero experience with iOS development and React to building a functional app, which is a huge accomplishment in itself. Specifically, we learned react native, Node.js, git, working as a team and iOS development as a whole.

What's next for myUIC App

Next, we plan to implement Firebase Authentication to ensure secure and hassle-free student login. But that's just the beginning. Our roadmap includes Android compatibility, making our app accessible to all students regardless of the device that they have. We also aim to integrate upgraded AI-powered chat support that is specifically trained to the UIC database for more instant and precise student support and offline access to key resources. Additionally, we plan to introduce the audience to personalized notifications and a user interface where they can change the theme of their app. By continuously improving and deepening our integration with campus services, we believe myUIC App will become the ultimate one-stop solution for a smarter, more connected campus experience