CHANGE HAND IN HAND WITH TECHNOLOGY Connecting students and systems By İrem Nur Bulut Koç University University Innovation Fellow You just woke up and checked your phone. There are a few messages from your friends about a new meme and upcoming quizzes, and a lot of emails related to school. Oh no! You wonder what could have happened for the administration to send you emails at 11:38 pm Saturday. You then urgently check and realize that they were all related to an event that you have seen the advertisement for at least two times beforehand. This was my life until very recently. Not only me but also many students in my school were sick of receiving so many school emails, and many of them have blocked or reported the school’s career accounts. Because of this spamming, many of the students miss opportunities. When we realized that this is a problem for the majority of students, we decided to take action as Fellows. As a group of Fellows who are studying either business or engineering, we searched the market for an existing solution. We found a few ideas, however they were either developed by separate entities or they were not open to the public, thus we were unable to gather information about them. Hence, we have designed KUlendar, which is an online portal that allows students to filter the events that are held in Koç University. At the moment, it only shows career events filtered for the interest of each individual. However, as a long term goal, we also want to unite our separate systems and create a platform on which the students can view not only events held by Koç University but also their deadlines and separate projects. In the future, it may also be used as an united calendar portal between universities across the globe to enable cross cultural innovation and entrepreneurship. In the development process of our app, we have decided to create a UIF community to develop our projects better with the help of multiple perspectives. We are now a big family consisting of individuals from very different backgrounds who are able to find and solve problems from their own lives. Although we had problems because we were also continuously developing three other projects during the development of KUlendar, we have realized that we can use the insights gained from other projects in KUlendar, which I believe have enriched our calendar portal project further.
Mobile home screen of KUlendar, courtesy of İrem Nur Bulut
During the development process, we were challenged as a team and on an individual level, and it led us to grow. For example, even though I have been a team leader for various projects, I never realized how hard it would be to direct a technical team. Because there were also a lot of necessary software related concepts that I was not aware of, to direct our team correctly, I had to first learn them on my own. However, I can proudly say that we have become a good team and friends although we have never even seen each other in real life. We still think that our projects are able to go much further and continuously seek new practices. This is the story of our solution and we think that tomorrow we can solve another problem better with your help. This was our solution, what would be yours?
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