Vaibhav Verma was frustrated that he could not get into the most popular courses at Rutgers University, so he decided to try a new approach.
He didn’t sleep outside classrooms to be first in line when the door opened, or send professors a solicitous note. Instead, he built a Web-based application that could repeatedly query the New Jersey university’s registration system. As soon as anyone dropped the class, Verma’s tool would send him a message, and he would grab the open spot.
“I built it just because I was a little bit bored,” he said.
By the next semester, 8,000 people had used it.
Experiences like that are becoming common at campuses around the country, as students are showing up the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, more informative and generally just better versions of the information systems at the heart of undergraduate life.
Students now arriving for fall semester may find course catalogs that they can instantly sort and re-sort according to every imaginable search criteria. But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.
Last year, 19 students at Baruch College in New York used a computer script to check for openings in crowded courses – at such high frequency that they nearly took down not just Baruch’s computer system but also that of the entire City University of New York. That earned them a stern talking-to. To some extent, the tension reflects a basic difference in worldview.
“Students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies can,” said Harry R. Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard’s computer science department.
Many campus developers say the next frontier is for more colleges to get comfortable releasing their information not case by case, but in uniform formats known as APIs (for application programming interfaces). That would make it possible, they say, to create tools that work at Florida State University as well as they do at Alaska Bible College. Students at disparate schools could spend time building on one another’s efforts instead of just replicating them.
“It turns out if you give students that power they’ll do some pretty great things with it,” said Alexey Komissarouk, who started a student group called PennApps while at the University of Pennsylvania.
