my.harvard's Makeover
It’s course registration season, and thousands of Harvard undergraduates have descended upon my.harvard to choose their classes. But registration on the platform doesn’t always run smoothly. Be it the numerous out-of-date courses that barrage your screen or the finicky search bar that just doesn’t seem to understand what class you are looking for, my.harvard suffers from its share of lags and hiccups.
In recent years, some tech-savvy students have created their own websites to fill the gaps in my.harvard. Though these alternatives address common complaints, some feel they, too, fall short in small ways. Classes.wtf has a comprehensive search engine but lacks any visuals to aid students in creating their schedule. Plancrimson.io requires an account to use the platform, which rules it out as a quick and accessible class reference.
In August 2023, Pranav Ramesh ’26 and Armaan Tipirneni ’26 created Classiq.red, another course selection platform. While the other course search platforms were viable options, Tipirneni and Ramesh wanted to create an effective tool that people would love. What inspired them? Apparently, a General Education class ranker Tipirneni had created for Computer Science 50: Introduction to Computer Science his freshman fall.
While Tipirneni says that initial website was bad, Ramesh has a different perspective on the project.
“It allowed me to find a Gen Ed which ended up fitting my schedule really well,” he says. “That’s what motivated me to be like, ‘Okay, if we can make this easy just for Gen Eds, let’s make it easy to search for other courses.’”
And so, in the span of three or four days, Ramesh and Tipirneni created Classiq.red, choosing to collaborate on the project because they had known each other for a while and trusted the other to be up for the challenge. Tipirneni calls Ramesh “the better coder, for sure,” describing himself as the “culture-fit hire.”
Classiq.red was born from Ramesh and Tipirneni’s personal experiences with course selection. “This is very motivated by the fact that we’re students — we’re the ones using this,” Ramesh explains. “If we have to use this every day, and it’s a platform that is not too easy for us to use, then obviously we want to look for something that’s a bit better of a solution.”
According to Ramesh, Classiq.red now supports 4,500 unique undergraduate students as active users. With its sleek, minimalist design, schedule matrix, and ability to download a student’s schedule into their personal calendar, the website offers an optimized alternative to my.harvard.
The success of Classiq.red caught the attention of an unlikely source: Harvard University Information Technology, responsible for the creation and maintenance of the original my.harvard. Nearly one decade after the last update, Harvard University Information Technology is now planning to launch a new update for my.harvard with the help of student recruits. Both Ramesh and Tipirneni have been in talks with HUIT to help with the redesign.
Tipirneni emphasized that the redesign of my.harvard was happening before his and Ramesh’s involvement, and the role the pair expects to play in this redesign will include consulting and front-end coding. There is one other student who is working on the project as a user interface designer — however, that seems to be the current extent of student involvement with the project.
Ramesh and Tipirneni are hopeful that with time, there will be opportunities for further student representation and collaboration on the redesign. “Ideally, we think the best possible thing would be to have a group of students helping with advocacy,” says Tipirneni. “We think small steps are probably the best way to go forward here.”