University of Maryland students can now be notified when their favorite foods are in the dining halls.
Sophomore computer science major Thomas Huitema launched a website in August that allows users to search for specific dining hall foods. The website, dubbed “TerpAlert,” lets students pick the foods they wish to enable alerts for. Students will then get an email when those foods are being served in any of the dining halls on campus.
Huitema set up an automated web scraper that collects menu data from this university’s Dining Services website. The information then gets added to a database and cross-checked with the alerts set by users. If there is a match, the website will send email alerts each time their selected foods are in the dining halls, he explained.
During the first week of school, Huitema posted about TerpAlert on multiple social media pages related to this university. He got about 50 sign-ups on the first day. As of Sept. 5, TerpAlert has more than 60 users, he said.
Huitema came up with the idea for TerpAlert during his freshman year as he discovered his favorite dining hall meals.
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“My favorite food last year was orange chicken, as I’m guessing a lot of other people had as their favorite food,” he said. “So I was always wondering when the dining halls had orange chicken, because it wasn’t very regular.”
Huitema spent the whole summer creating TerpAlert. Sometimes he worked for up to eight hours a day, he said.
“My favorite thing is that [TerpAlert] actually helps people,” Huitema said. “It’s just very fulfilling to see that something I made is being used by people I’ve never met before to help their own lives.”
Dining Services spokesperson Bart Hipple learned about TerpAlert from Dining Services’ student engagement team, a group of students that keeps up with social media and trends. He plans to look further into TerpAlert and thinks the website’s success will depend on how accurate it is and how well it is maintained.
“I think it’s exciting to know what students want,” Hipple told The Diamondback. “Clearly at least one person … felt a need to build this and put some serious time into it, because it looks pretty good.”
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TerpAlert has helped senior accounting and information systems major Akshita Alousyes plan which dining halls to visit. The app can be particularly helpful to students like herself with connector dining plans, who need to pick and choose their dining hall trips, according to Alousyes.
“I think it’s a really awesome idea,” Alousyes said. “There’s foods that I really like that don’t come around as often, so it would be really awesome to be able to know when they are going to be at the diner and which diner I should go to.”
Huitema would like to add a rating and comment section to TerpAlert for students to recommend foods to each other. He also hopes to create a feature that allows students to suggest food recommendations for the dining halls, like a new type of pizza or dessert.
