Building CollegeHub

Backstory

When I was a freshman, I had no experience with building projects, let alone websites. I learned whatever I could from my courses but never knew how to apply them to a project from start to finish. Many documentations, Udemy courses, frustrating nights and rage quits later, I felt comfortable in being able to manifest an idea into a real product. Be it a website, or just a simple script that did something cool like log in to my university website every time I access it.

One such project was a simple personal website. I saw many seniors have one of their own which they used as their ‘personal brand’. More often than not, it was as simple as finding or building a simple template in HTML and CSS, putting in all your information, and publishing it. Almost every personal website was built this way.

When the time came for me to build mine and showcase my stuff I also followed the same routine. I used GitHub’s static website hosting to publish it and I was ready to go.

You can still see it here

But, I was not satisfied. I was happy with the way it looked, but I felt that I am more than just HTML and CSS. I am Fullstack. So I began working on a concept where I can add, remove, and update information on my website dynamically. I used Django and Python to come up with a CRUD application that dynamically handles my portfolio. That became my official website and my ‘personal brand’.

You can check it out here!

(Re)Birth

When I showed this to my friends, they were impressed with the idea. They all wanted to make one like mine but my code was a bit too hard-coded for my own needs. So, we came up with a new idea.

What if we took this dynamic portfolio generator, and abstracted it out for anyone. Our niche was targeting college students like ourselves who can easily build a beautiful portfolio in minutes.

“So… Linkedin ?”

Well, yes but technically no. We wanted to add a customizable touch to the idea of building out your college portfolio. Thus, CollegeHub was born.

But why the name, CollegeHub. What’s so “hub-by” about it? We wanted CollegeHub to be more than just a glorified resume.

Here is a glimpse at my profile on CollegeHub.

So, what else do we offer?

CollegeHub comes with fast, easy-to-access features that will make your site stand out. These features make CollegeHub a one-stop-shop to create, customize, and share your portfolio easily. College students can sign up, and choose from a range of templates to match their style and get up and running without hassles.

Through CollegeHub, students can also manage their events and schedules. Through the event planner feature, they can create new events, with the feature of inviting others as well. Students also have access to a personal blog which they can use as part of their portfolio. Since this website is for any college student, there should be no limits as to what they’d like to showcase.

What next?

We demoed our website at University at Buffalo’s CSE Demo Day. Many judges and visitors were impressed by the idea and we received positive feedback. We also received a lot of suggestions which we noted down as well. We placed 2nd amongst 25-30 other capstone projects from UB.

In the future, we want to roll out our website to students at UB and other universities. We plan to leverage multiple platforms to advertise and promote our website. This could be through Linkedin, jumpstart, University email lists, Reddit, etc.

As far as the dev team goes, we want to continually update and maintain the website with more features to enrich the user experience. We plan to roll out templates to choose from, categorizing styles as we expand. We hope to turn the event planner into a more robust feature that offers automatic event management, event conflict notifications, recurring schedules, and calendar views. We also want to integrate existing social applications like Linkedin to build the profile.

Another interesting feature on our roadmap is a curated job-board that focuses on New Grad roles and internships, further justifying the name of our product, CollegeHub.

My teammates, Christopher Perez, Sauptik Saha, Rayan Ray, Tamaghan Maurya, and I are very excited about the future of CollegeHub.

Check out CollegeHub today, and leave us feedback at
teamcollegehub@gmail.com