Website

TerpMeet - Connecting Students Through Events

Inspiration

As college freshmen navigate campus life, making friends can be challenging. TerpMeet was born from the idea that shared interests and events are the perfect ice-breakers. We wanted to create a platform where students could discover events, meet like-minded peers, and build their campus community.

What We Built

TerpMeet is a full-stack event management platform featuring:

Beautiful, animated UI with Framer Motion and Tailwind CSS
Real-time event feed where students can browse and join events
Smart attendee matching - see who's attending and their interests before you go
Seamless UX - from signup to event creation in seconds

Tech Stack

Frontend: React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion
Backend: Node.js, Express
Database: MongoDB with Mongoose
Deployment: Railway (full-stack single deployment)

How We Built It

We started with a RESTful API backend, designing MongoDB schemas to handle many-to-many relationships between users and events. The frontend leverages React's component architecture with beautiful animations via Framer Motion. We implemented automatic attendee population so users can see full profile details of everyone attending an event - making it easier to find common interests.

Challenges

Rapid deployment: We optimized for speed, combining frontend and backend into a single Railway deployment
Database relationships: Implementing efficient many-to-many relationships with proper population
UX polish: Balancing beautiful animations with performance