UChicagoEvents is a social tool that provides a centralized location for UChicago students to have access to all events happening on campus, and was started by second-years David Campillo, Victor Kung, Shaan Sapra, and Dan Yu. Below, the team tells us about the launch of UChicagoEvents!
What is UChicagoEvents, and what motivated you to create the site?
Victor: By leveraging Facebook’s social network, UChicagoEvents provides the most comprehensive events website for students and provides event organizers with a greater and more specific audience at no cost.
As students in the College, we were motivated to create this website through our own previous frustrations with finding interesting things to do on campus. UChicago has a global reputation for being a place where supposedly “Fun comes to die,” a sentiment that is also shared by some UChicago students. However, there are in fact tons of cool events going on campus every day and we feel that it is a great shame that most students don’t know about everything that’s going on around them.
Tell us a little about the overall building process. How long did it take until you were able to launch the site? Did you face any challenges along the way?
Shaan: Development for the project began in mid-January as I created a basic outline of the website. After integrating the application with Facebook and creating a comprehensive list of updated and relevant events, I was able to reach the deadline for a beta release of April 1st. Daniel and I worked together to improve the performance to make sure that students were able to quickly browse events without any inconveniences.
How did the four of you end up working together?
David: The idea began with Victor who shared his vision with programmers Shaan and Daniel, both of whom agreed to help create the website. As we launched UChicagoEvents and continued to grow, I was invited to join the team as our marketer. The four of us have actually known each other since first year, and we recognize that each of us has a particular expertise that contributes to the overall success of UChicagoEvents.
How do you plan on expanding UChicagoEvents in the future?
David: Our current goal is to reach out to more students within UChicago. We are working hard to increase awareness for our website and are also in talks with the university administration in order to increase the number of events in our database. Furthermore, we are looking forward to establishing partnerships with local businesses around Hyde Park in order to provide UChicago students with great student deals and discounts through our website.
In the long term, we hope to expand our concept to other colleges in the Chicago area. We understand that college students in other universities also suffer from lack of access to campus events. Therefore, our mission is to provide students all over America with as much information about all the events going on at their institutions.