UW Eng Network

Students post what they're building, profs and peers discover them through their work. It's our haven for nerds. It's not LinkedIn, it's a dev log. Small wins, real projects, no clout chasing.

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✨Try it NOW! ✨

Presentation slides

Inspiration

UW engineering students are isolated across departments, co-op terms, and social circles. They work on projects solo with no easy way to find teammates and waste hours on Discord, Instagram, and websites for opportunities such as research or projects, only to face cold email rejections. Meanwhile, professors struggle to discover skilled, interested students that can help with their research.

We would like to bridge this gap by bringing like-minded people that would like to collaborate and contribute to projects or research, providing a platform where we can find people on campus to work with or network with.

What it does

UW Network connects Waterloo engineering students and professors, where they can:

  • Post and share the projects or ideas they're working on
  • Easier research opportunities to find on campus where students and profs can find them and reach out to them.
  • Find your community and collaborate on interesting, cool projects or research!
  • Send messages to people; no need for email, just do it here!
  • Searchable by department and research interest, scraped from public UW faculty pages.
  • Discrete Likes The author sees who noticed them, nobody else does.
  • WATCARD verification ONLY for UW Engineering students, verified via WATCARD photo upload.

How we built it

Front-end: React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS

Back-end: Python

AI tools: Claude Code, Gemini API, Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Challenges we ran into

  • Talking to users about finding a problem that students face
  • Needing to manually email professors -Integration issues due to dependency conflicts deployment issue

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We got 2 professors who are interested in our solution!
  • Be able to create a solution that brings the engineering community together!

What we learned

  • We learned how to webscrape and store data in .csv format
  • We learned how to store data encrypted

What's next for UW Network

  • We would like to scale it for Waterloo alumni and integrate it for different schools.
  • Add recruiters to scout out cool projects
  • Expand it to different schools

Team Emails

Eric Zou: eric.zou1@uwaterloo.ca Bella Kim: b37kim@uwaterloo.ca Reanna Liu: r6liu@uwaterloo.ca

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