Since publishing our jobs guide last year, The Diamondback has continued to explore how we can serve information needs among the University of Maryland community. But we know the best ideas waiting to be realized could come from anyone on this university’s campus. Last semester, we hosted the first ever “Diamondhack,” a campuswide hackathon that challenged community members to solve problems on campus using journalism and technology.
One of the top submissions came from junior computer science majors Kito Pang and Rohan Sharma. In their submission, Pang and Sharma wrote that sites such as Testudo and PlanetTerp have a ton of course data, but don’t directly help students find courses based on their interests. That leaves many students to find courses through Reddit, Google or word-of-mouth, they said.
“To solve this issue, we built a UMD course searching tool that behaves like a real search engine,” Pang and Sharma wrote in their submission, equating their Course Search tool to “Google but for UMD courses.”
The Diamondback is thrilled to have partnered with Pang and Sharma to launch the site courses.dbknews.com. The Course Search has a simple but effective interface and will provide immediate value to students at this university.
We look forward to community feedback on the site to further understand how to help the campus community with a central part of college life: finding your next class. Feel free to reach out to onlineumdbk@gmail.com with any questions or feedback.
Explore The Diamondback’s course search tool here.
