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💙 SpartanCircle 💛

Find your people. Build your circle.

🎮 Try SpartanCircle →

💡 Inspiration

Making friends in college is weirdly hard especially as a commuter student myself.

You can be surrounded by thousands of students every day and still have no idea who shares your classes, has the same interests as you, is looking for a study partner, or even has the same giant gap between classes.

That's where the idea for SpartanCircle came from.

We wanted to make it easier for SJSU students to find people they would actually want to meet — not just random profiles, but other Spartans who have something in common with them.

Maybe you need someone to study with for a class. Maybe you're looking for people to join a club with. Maybe you commute to campus and want a commute buddy. Or maybe you're a freshman/transfer who just wants to make some friends.

We also didn't want creating a profile to feel like filling out another boring school form or following a profile on Instagram. We went with a pixel-art style and tried to make onboarding feel a little more like setting up your character before entering a game.

There are already people at SJSU you would probably get along with. SpartanCircle helps you find them.

SpartanCircle Banner- Pixel Student

🌀 What it does

SpartanCircle helps SJSU students find and connect with other students based on their classes, majors, interests, skills, availability, goals, and the kinds of connections they're looking for.

When someone joins, they start by building their SpartanCircle profile.

🎓 Academics

Students can search for their current SJSU major, add a major they might be interested in switching to, and select the classes they're currently taking.

Instead of making students type everything manually, we created searchable major and course selectors using SJSU data.

That means SpartanCircle can recognize when students share a class, major, or academic path.

❤️ Interests + Goals

Students can choose interests like music, sports, art, gaming, reading, cooking, theatre, and more.

If we didn't include something, they can just add their own custom interest.

Students can also tell SpartanCircle about their career goals, study style, and how they prefer collaborating with other people.

⭐ Skills

Interests tell us what someone enjoys. Skills tell us what they can bring to a friendship, project, or study group.

Students can select skills like programming, graphic design, photography, tutoring, leadership, writing, research, and more — or add their own.

🤝 Connections

Not everyone is looking for the same thing, so students can choose multiple kinds of connections:

🤝 Friends
👥 Club Buddies
📚 Study Buddies
💻 Project Partners
🚗 Commute Buddies
💼 Career / Networking

Someone looking for a project partner probably cares about different things than someone looking for a friend to grab food with, so we wanted SpartanCircle to know the difference.

📅 Availability

Students can take the classes they selected earlier and build their weekly schedule by choosing the day and time of each meeting.

Classes can be added multiple times, so something that meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday can actually be represented correctly.

This gives SpartanCircle another useful piece of information when connecting people: when they're actually available.

🔒 Privacy + Socials

We didn't want using SpartanCircle to mean automatically sharing everything about yourself.

Students can decide whether their profile is visible, whether connections can see their email, and how much of their availability they want to share:

Full · Limited · Hidden

They can also optionally add Instagram, Discord, TikTok, and LinkedIn information. If two Spartans meet through the platform and want to keep talking, they can choose how they want to connect.

💬 Chat + Recommendations

After onboarding, students enter the main SpartanCircle platform where they can discover recommended Spartans and communicate through live chat.

The information collected during onboarding gives us much more to work with than a basic profile. Instead of recommending someone just because they have the same major, SpartanCircle can consider different parts of student life together.

SpartanCircle Banner - Sammy

🛠️ How we built it

We built SpartanCircle by taking inspiration from platforms like Instagram and Discord.

We wanted the live communication of Discord combined with the social discovery and recommendation side of platforms like Instagram.

To speed up development, we started with SaaS templates instead of spending our limited hackathon time rebuilding common boilerplate from scratch. From there, we connected Supabase and used its authentication, database, and real-time capabilities to power important parts of the application, including live chat.

At the same time, we developed the onboarding experience separately so we could work on different parts of SpartanCircle in parallel.

For onboarding, our goal was to keep the experience simple and intuitive while still collecting enough information to make student profiles and future recommendations useful.

Once both sides were working, we brought the onboarding experience and the main SpartanCircle platform together into one application.

🧩 Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was actually the same thing that allowed us to build faster: working on different parts of SpartanCircle separately.

The onboarding experience and the main application were developed independently so we could work in parallel, but that meant we eventually had to figure out how to unify two different pieces into one smooth experience.

We also initially planned separate authentication and database workflows before realizing that Supabase could handle the database, authentication, and real-time functionality within the same application.

That forced us to rethink some of our original architecture, but ultimately gave us a much cleaner setup.

A lot of the project became an exercise in figuring out when to keep building what we originally planned and when it made more sense to simplify.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud that SpartanCircle went from a bunch of ideas and mockups to something that actually feels usable.

One of our biggest goals was making onboarding feel fun instead of overwhelming. We ask students for quite a bit of information, so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to break that into smaller steps and make each screen interactive.

Some things we're especially proud of:

🎨 Creating our own pixel-inspired visual style across the onboarding experience
✨ Adding animations and small interactions instead of making onboarding feel like one giant form
🖼️ Letting students upload and crop their own profile picture
🔎 Building searchable SJSU major and course selectors
📚 Letting students add and remove the classes they're actually taking
❤️ Supporting both suggested and completely custom interests
⭐ Doing the same for student skills
🤝 Supporting six different kinds of connections instead of assuming everyone joins for the same reason
📅 Building a weekly class schedule where the same course can appear multiple times
🔐 Giving students control over their privacy and availability as well as having a strong authentication system so SJSU students will be ensured to hangout with SJSU students and not someone else
💬 Connecting the onboarding experience to recommendations and real-time chat

We're also proud of all the tiny details that probably weren't necessary but made the project feel like SpartanCircle — the mascot, speech bubbles, pixel buttons, animations, colors, and all the little pieces we kept tweaking until they felt right.

🧠 What we learned

We learned pretty quickly that something looking simple in a design does not mean it's simple to code. 😭

A searchable dropdown, image cropper, multi-select button, responsive layout, or weekly calendar might look like one little box on the screen, but making it behave the way a user expects can take a surprising amount of work.

We also learned a lot about what information actually makes a good student connection.

At first it's easy to think, "We'll match people who have the same interests." But the more we worked on SpartanCircle, the more we realized how much context matters.

Two students might both be Computer Science majors, but one could be looking for a project partner while the other just wants friends. Two people could have completely different majors but share three interests, similar availability, and the same career goal.

That made us think about matching as something much more interesting than finding one thing two profiles have in common.

And there was a lot of iteration.

We'd build something, look at it, realize "yeah... this is way too crowded," move everything around, test it again, break something else, fix that, and eventually end up with something we liked.

Since we were also developing different parts of SpartanCircle in parallel, we learned a lot about collaboration, Git/GitHub, integrating separate pieces of a project, and making design and engineering decisions together.

🚀 What's next for SpartanCircle

There's a lot more we would love to do with SpartanCircle.

🧠 Smarter recommendations

We want SpartanCircle to get better at understanding why someone is searching for another person.

If you're looking for a study buddy, shared classes and overlapping availability should probably matter more.

If you're looking for friends, interests might matter more.

If you're looking for a project partner, skills, major, and career goals could become more important.

Instead of using the exact same matching logic for everyone, we'd like recommendations to adapt to the type of connection each student wants.

🏫 Bring more of campus into SpartanCircle

Right now, SpartanCircle focuses mostly on connecting individual students. We'd love to expand that to more parts of campus life, including:

student clubs and organizations
campus events
study groups
class communities
major-specific communities
mentorship opportunities
more tools for commuters and transfer students

💬 Make reaching out easier

Finding someone you might get along with is only the first step.

We want to keep improving what happens between:

"This person seems cool."

and

"Hey, want to study together after class?"

That could include better messaging, connection requests, notifications, more profile customization, and other ways to make reaching out to someone new feel less awkward.

🌎 Expand SpartanCircle beyond SJSU

SJSU is where SpartanCircle started, but we don't want it to be where SpartanCircle stops.

Making friends, finding study partners, meeting people in your major, and finding your place on campus aren't problems unique to SJSU. Students at colleges everywhere deal with the same thing.

Our long-term goal is to expand SpartanCircle to other colleges and universities, with each school having its own campus community.

The experience could adapt to each university's majors, courses, clubs, events, and campus culture while keeping the same core idea behind SpartanCircle.

Maybe one day there isn't just one SpartanCircle — there are campus circles at colleges everywhere.

But wherever SpartanCircle goes, we want to keep the same goal: