Students Create Another Course-Shopping Website
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Shopping period is many things: complex, exhausting, exhilarating, overwhelming. But the process of looking for classes probably hasn’t been described before as "awesome, intuitive, and sexy."
That's about to change, if freshman roommates Ben S. Kuhn '15 and Billy A. Janitsch '15 have their way. They say that their new site, Harvard-Class.com, will bring course searching into modern times.
"We just wanted the school to have a better course catalog," Janitsch said. "It's really surprised me that such a well-endowed university doesn't have the capability to have a decent course catalog."
Janitsch said that the website owes its inspiration to courses.cs50.net, an old standby for Harvard students, and to Yale's online catalog. The website uses columns rather than the rows in CS50's version and offers instantaneous searching so that users don't have to wait after typing in their search terms.
Since going online two days ago, the site has seen 1,200 unique visitors from 54 countries as of Sunday afternoon, Kuhn said. Two-thirds of that traffic has come from people posting links to the site on Facebook.
The duo still hopes to add new features to the site before school begins in September. They plan to incorporate Q guide ratings, information on professors, and the option of searching by Gen Ed area or course prerequisite.
They might also incorporate recommendations of the "if you liked this class, you might also like" variety. Perhaps we can look forward to course shopping Ă la Netflix.