Inspiration
As freshmen, we have tried to plan our future semesters at Rutgers but struggled to find the resources to do so. Even when we found the resourses, they were poorly organized or difficult to understand. So we decided to make our own.
What it does
Our program is intended to be a better, simpler, more student-oriented version of Degree Navigator. We want students to be able to see all their major and school requirements in one centralized location with a visually friendly design.
How we built it
To create our app, we utilized the MERN stack. For the backend, we utilized MongoDB and Mongoose to manage our database, as well as Express.js and Node.js in order to bridge to the frontend. In the frontend we utilize Vite with React.js, and axios in order to be able to make GET and POST requests. Furthermore, we tried to stylize our application using tailwind CSS. We harnessed Auth0 due to its simple user authentication setup and deployed our backend on Heroku and frontend on Vercel.
Challenges we ran into
Throughout the 24 hours, we stumbled upon many challenges. Initially, finding the data for all the courses and majors at Rutgers proved difficult. However, we found a way to use the Google Development Console to make GET requests to receive data from existing Rutgers websites. This gave us JSON, which we then had to parse and format in order to add to our database, which we eventually managed to do. Throughout the entire coding process, we faced many errors and bugs
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was both of our first hackathons, and we were able to create a functional project by the end. We learned frameworks that we had limited or no experience with in the past and built up a solid understanding by the end of the second day. We stayed up most of the night coding and learning new technologies, and by the end, we had a much better understanding of all the frameworks we used.
What we learned
We learned new languages and frameworks. However, we also were able to truly experience the process of building a project with a team, with constraints. This gave us a glimpse into what "real" coding may be like, and gave us a base to build projects from in the future. Furthermore, it was very interesting to create the bridge between different frameworks and be able to see how all these technologies work together in the backend.
What's next for RU Scheduling?
We intend to keep updating this project with the final goal of being able to deploy it to the Rutgers student base. We will continue adding features and updating the design, as we had much more in mind but were limited by our time constraints. We want this to be the future of degree planning at Rutgers.
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