YEPIEEEEEE! I feel really happy because the website I made has finally launched. This project took me around a month. From not knowing how to create a project in WebStorm to finally deploying the website, I learned so much—much more than school can teach me.
I was inspired by UCSBPlat. When I first used that website, I was amazed by how simple it was while still having so much information on it. I knew that was the kind of website we were missing here, so I created one.
School teaches you how to write code and pass unit tests, but it doesn’t teach you how to connect with people and sell your product. I connected with the creator of UCSBPlat, Jiaming, on LinkedIn and told him about the project. He complimented my idea and offered help. While building the website, I showed the V1 version to different students, instructors, and LTAs. Even though some people tried to convince me not to launch it because this website was supposedly really “easy” to make, I still got mostly positive feedback from others.
Thanks to Alba for helping me find bugs in the sections, Elizabeth for encouraging the idea and being the first one to offer grade distribution data, Kira for telling me I should be proud of myself, and Professor Strenn for telling me mine is faster than the original website. Thanks also to Hoyong, Ximi, Mimi, Adelina, and Sean for helping me brainstorm the website.
I feel really grateful, and I’ve come to realize that connecting with people is way more important than having a perfect GPA.
Helping the community has always been something I care about deeply. As for the future of this website, I don’t know who will maintain it yet. But I do want to add more features and make it into a website that can really benefit community college students. I want to include grade distributions, and maybe even integrate assist.org.
Hopefully, with all these features, this website will benefit students in the long term by helping them make smarter decisions when it comes to registering for classes, and most importantly, helping them succeed academically.