StudHub

By students, for students. A place where you can be yourself, help others, and find other open-minded individuals to work on meaningful projects.

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Inspiration🎓

To make the context clear, we are three students who believe that meaningful work facilitates self-content, inspiration and projects that either help others or ourselves. Since we joined university(we are all first-years), we did not find what we did so meaningful anymore. We had great expectations since we were all enrolled in a top 100 university. Still, we were surprised to see how little they cared about our creativity, ideas, and overall potential. Things were too theoretical; some answers in different disciplines, which turned out to be correct, were dismissed because they were not based on ”the old ways”.

Also, there was no easy way to cooperate with other disciplines. Unless you go out partying, and by some luck, you are not an introvert, there is no easy way to meet someone. For example, maybe as a business student, you cannot really meet someone from computer science or design so easily. Unless you go out of your way, there is no simple way to meet like-minded people that could help you create something meaningful.

Obviously, there are apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Reddit and fiver. Though, the way they are created and marketed, there is not much chance you find what you need. Almost no one answers messages from strangers on Instagram or Facebook. On LinkedIn, people are there for internships and money, pretending to be some fancy intellectual. Reddit is not really used by that many students, not as a way to meet students anyways, and if you need a specialist on fiver for anything unless you are rich, good luck with paying him.

We want to create a safe place for us, young individuals, who want something more than base our happiness on exam grades, work for a corporation for our entire life after 3-5 years of grinding for good marks, for subjects that don’t necessarily help you at anything or where we can meet students from all the disciplines, not only our own.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”-actually not by Albert Einstein.

We strongly advise people to pursue a university; we are not against it, though we advise not to base your life upon it; it’s great as a safety net and learning place. We don’t like the old premise of you will do nothing with your life unless you finish your degree we want to truly bring the youth to their true potential, not inhibit it. Each year, the crisis of meaning expands, especially in young individuals. If not give rebirth to it, we would love to contribute to providing students with another chance to create, develop and meet other great colleagues

What it does🔧

StudHub is an app with different features that facilitate flow in terms of building projects, meeting open-minded individuals and discussing with and helping fellow students.

The main features will be the main page, creating a post(with a specific template) and a search bar. The main page will consist of projects posted based on a template that doesn’t reveal too much, though enough to make people get the idea. For example, you are a computer science student with a great app idea. You are a great back-end developer though you know nothing in UI/UX design; respectively, you are pretty introverted and don’t know how to actually create a brand out of it as well. By posting your idea succinctly and selecting the skills you need for your projects, people with those specific skills, if they like your idea, can send you a request to get in touch with you. On the other hand, you can also search for these people in the search bar.

As stated above, if you are a creative individual, you can post your ideas and find the people you need for projects. On the other hand, if you want to do something meaningful with your free time but you are sick of volunteering work that just gives you a diploma and a line in your cv, this is a place for you too!

Other Features consist of:

  1. “Reddit-style” thread (we are still developing/designing our own style for this), where you can ask questions, discuss different topics, and search for answers to whatever questions you have. It can be mostly based around student problems, passions, anything really! We want to create a safe space for meeting other students too!
  2. Messages
  3. Notifications
  4. Profile (where you can select your skills and write about yourself; we want the real you! We’ll try to make sure no prospective employer can judge you based on that!
  5. Learning environment; in the future, here, we will create courses on practical topics that are important but not so often taught in university. (public speaking, leadership, etc.)

We initially viewed it as a website. We have started development on Firebase. Though during the hackathon we realized that our main target demographic(Students and young individuals) uses mostly their phones, which meant an app would be significantly better and preferred. Then we started working on Flutter.

How we built it👨‍🎨

Using the Flutter framework, we built a cross-platform app (Android/IOS/Web). For the backend, we used Firebase as a provider, its Authentication module, and also Firebase Firestore for our NoSQL database.

Challenges we ran into⚖️

The post feature is the greatest challenge, which is still in discussion. We want to build a template and guideline as straightforward as possible that does not disclose too many of the ideas that someone will just take it. We are thinking about how to implement NDAs when you get it to discuss with interested people, but right now, the focus is to create a working MVP.

The overall concept is pretty hard to explain without looking like we are against universities. We genuinely find them very important to one's individual development. We are actively working to find a way to tell our story and create a brand that supports creativity and the individual while not sounding too much against the traditional model.

Also, due to the many features we want to add, it is a constant struggle to make everything as efficient, aesthetic and easy as possible. We are pretty much in an age of attention deficit, so we want to build something neat and user-friendly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of🧐

We are genuinely surprised by the fact that our app constantly worked almost without any problems throughout the whole 36h.

We have never fought on any subject; we constantly built on each other's ideas and realized that we work lovely as a team. Any problems we had were discussed calmly and found a middle way.

What we learned 👩‍🏫

A new programming language we had never worked with Dart before until the start of the Hackathon! A new framework, it was our first time on Flutter before either!

How to listen to each other more without interrupting. And most importantly, working without sleep for 36 hours and a lot of caffeine! :D

What's next for StudHub🚀

We have discussed this thoroughly, and after the Hackathon, we need to find an affordable UX/UI designer (ironically enough, our app would have been so helpful for this) to either join our project or at least build a starting page where we can have a subscription list, where we could make the "proof of concept" for our idea.

Eventually, we will send emails with updates on the project. During this Hackathon, we realized how in love we are with this idea, and we want to continue building on it and eventually launching it.

For now, our focus will be to design it as efficient, aesthetic and user-friendly and make it functional. We want to go through what we built during the Hackathon to analyze what we did out of speed and what we want to keep. There are many things that need more thought.

We also want to add "Meet your Mentor"! In an even further future, we want to implement a feature where our dear users can talk with experienced people from a diverse array of subjects, ask for advice on a making project, open a business, start research, etc.

We hope that our concept will catch on and become a big trend, eventually leading to many young individuals with great potential to meet each other and build beautiful things! I personally feel lucky to have met the people I have worked within this Hackathon because they became some of my best friends that I spend much time with. We hope to take the luck element out and make it easier for people to meet such beautiful people, that not only they will create cool projects and businesses, but they will become maybe friends for life.

Do not forget, creating stuff is cool but meeting great people is sometimes even cooler!

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