Locust Walk is often littered with flyers promoting campus events and club meetings. But, what if there were one location for students to access information on all these events, get movie listings and check their e-mail?
Several Engineering students have joined forces to make this possible. The students are members of the Engineering Dean's Advisory Board, and they have teamed up to create a Web portal for Engineering students at Penn. The portal allows students to receive club updates and check e-mail, weather and campus events at one location.
Unlike newsgroups, the graphic-based portal gives students the option of personalizing their web pages to reflect their interests and informational needs.
Engineering senior Yale Chang points out that the goal is not for the portal to compete with Yahoo and America Online home pages that have any and every link imaginable. Instead, the information and features contained on the Engineering portal are targeted specifically toward student needs.
"We're hoping students will want to use this as their homepage and their Web portal for the the internet," Engineering senior Sam Hui said.
The project began a year and a half ago with the combined brainstorming efforts of Hui, Chang and Engineering senior Ross Giambalvo. The three students approached administrators at Computing and Educational Technological Services with their ideas for the portal in order to move the project forward.
Hui distinguishes the portal from the Wharton Webmail service by pointing out that the Engineering portal will be student life-oriented, as opposed to the career focus of the Wharton site.
While the content is directed toward Engineering students, all students can gain authorized access through the use of their PennNet IDs.
"We'd like to share this Web portal with students of other schools," Giambalvo said.
CETS Director Helen Anderson explained that site administrators are now focusing on extending the portal to University-wide status. Through working with both Information Systems and Computing and Business Services, the portal is expected to allow students access to Penn InTouch as well as Dining Services through one page.
"The time is right to do something like this," Anderson said. "I think it's cool."
Currently, all of the Engineering clubs have their own modules through which they can post events on the Web. Students can then subscribe to the particular modules that interest them.
"The challenge is in getting clubs to consistently update the content, which takes some effort," Anderson explained.
With Hui, Giambalvo and Chang graduating this year, though, they will unfortunately miss out on the final fruits of their labor. Engineering sophomores Sapna Tejwani and Isaac Choi have recently joined the three and hope to continue improving upon the existing portal.
Despite his imminent departure, Hui has grand expectations for the project's long-term growth. He says he sees a personal calendar as a future feature of the portal.
And in the future, students may be able to subscribe to friends' modules in order plan meetings.
The students involved say that they hope to officially launch the portal this week. As flyers go up announcing the portal's arrival, the students hope that this outdated method of communication will soon be put to rest.
