Every student at the University is familiar with the horror of registering for classes — the whirlwind of desperately trying to maneuver the Student Information System and find classes that don’t all occur at the same time. With course registration for the spring semester creeping up on us once again, many students would warmly welcome any method of untangling the muddle of classes, credits and conflicting times.
Fourth-year Engineering students Srikanth Chelluri and Nikhil Gupta are the creators of “uva schedule | me,” an interactive website that allows students to browse courses and sections, build schedules and view course grades. Chelluri and Gupta developed the website as a way to simplify the process of choosing courses each semester.
“I found myself, like, using Excel spreadsheets and pen and paper to like figure out what classes I wanted to take, whether they fit in my schedule,” Gupta said. “It took forever, especially with planning for, you know, long-term situations like what can I do semester over semester — and so I was just thinking there has to be a better way to do this.”
Chelluri and Gupta, who have been friends since high school, initially proposed the idea of a scheduling tool for a Hack.UVA event. Although they did not follow through with the idea during the event, the pair did develop uva schedule | me afterwards. They launched their original site, a preliminary version that allowed students to visualize schedules, in February 2015.
Chelluri and Gupta publicized their website through word-of-mouth and Facebook posts, attracting roughly 5,000 users in their first semester of operation. Roughly a year and a half later, in October 2016, the pair spent several months revamping the site based on feedback and requests for new features and functionalities. The improved site was launched early this year and enables students to save and share schedules and view full lists of existing classes, descriptions, times, sections, instructors, evaluations and grades.
“We decided let’s just redo it from scratch and just have one central place where people can do their scheduling,” Gupta said. “We’re trying to replace Lou’s List and theCourseForum in our site and kind of combine it all into one.”
Today, uva schedule | me has accumulated around 320,000 page views, and there are about 6,300 accounts on the site. Chelluri and Gupta earn revenue from the site through advertisements and donations. However, they are not interested in profiting from their venture. All revenue is used to pay services that keep the site up and running.
After the revamping, Chelluri and Gupta are satisfied with their current site and do not intend to make any more significant changes.
“We’ve had a few feature requests, but the way the site is structured right now after all the bug fixes and changes we’ve made since [the] release is how we think it’s the simplest and most intuitive way to actually schedule your classes,” Chelluri said.
Chelluri and Gupta also allow their data on courses, times and grades to be made available to others who want to develop their own applications related to student scheduling. They recognize that the biggest challenge in developing uva schedule | me was acquiring all the necessary data, and would like to make this process easier for others. Several groups have already reached out to Chelluri and Gupta with ideas for further applications based on the information in their database.
The pair said they have received overwhelmingly positive feedback on their endeavor, and that many University students have found uva schedule | me to be an immensely helpful tool in the course selection process. Third-year Commerce student Elizabeth Muratore has been using uva schedule | me since her first semester at the University and loves the visual aspect of the site.
“It was actually in a format where you could productively build your schedule and see what fit and how it was actually going to turn out,” Muratore said. “I thought it was really useful, and I’ve used it ever since to plan out my schedule every semester.”
Chelluri and Gupta will graduate from the University in December and May, respectively. The pair are considering what to do with the website after they leave and hope to find younger students who can continue to work with and maintain uva schedule | me going forward.
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