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Campus

Helping Students Find Their Fit During a Pandemic

Co-founded with two college friends, Campus set out to fix how students discovered clubs and community, a problem COVID made urgent overnight. I led research and design and built roughly half the frontend, eventually winning a competitive bid to run the university's official virtual club fair.

Date 2019–2022

Role Co-Founder, Designer & Product Lead

Tools

FigmaReact NativePostgreSQLZoom

Responsibilities

User ResearchMobile DesignMobile ProgrammingBackend ProgrammingStakeholder Management

Problem Statement

Discovery Was Front-Loaded, and Students Couldn’t Catch Up

Club discovery at my school ran almost entirely through one mechanism: an in-person club fair during the first weeks of fall semester. It worked well for the students it worked for, but it front-loaded all discovery into a moment when most first-years were distracted by classes, new friendships, and the general chaos of starting college.

It also left no good path back in. Students who didn’t find their fit the first time, or whose plans changed later in the year, had nowhere to turn. When COVID hit, the fair was cancelled outright, and the informal, serendipitous ways students normally found community (walking back from the library, a flyer in a campus-wide group chat) had no virtual equivalent.

User Research and Analysis

Finding Your Fit Was Left to Chance

I’d lived a version of this problem myself. I met my eventual co-founder through track, and we’d both gone through that spring scramble of trying to find a new community after our first-semester groups hadn’t worked out. So going into this, I already had a strong hunch about what was broken. But a hunch isn’t research, so over about a month at the start of the school year, I ran around a dozen exploratory interviews with first-year students, five formal interviews with club leaders, and a competitive analysis against GroupMe, the university’s existing club software, and what peer schools were doing. We synthesized all of it as a team through How Might We sessions, dot-voting to prioritize which problems to actually go after.

### Discovery Was More Serendipity Than System

Most students found clubs through word-of-mouth and mutual friends, not anything resembling a deliberate search. Students who made close friends in their first couple weeks had an easier time, because those friends became a pipeline of invitations and reassurance. Students who didn’t get that early win tended to stay stuck. Showing up to something alone is a much bigger ask than showing up with someone you already know.

What Leaders Saw vs. What Students Felt

Clubs Felt Less Open Than Leaders Thought

Every club leader I talked to said their club was welcoming and always looking for new members. But from the student side, that warmth often didn’t come through. Clubs didn’t feel easy to just show up to if you didn’t already know someone there.

Discovery Was Incidental, and That Didn’t Survive Going Virtual

A lot of discovery happened through a campus-wide group chat that mostly got used for free food alerts, and students would show up for the food and stumble into a club that way. Other discovery happened just walking around campus. None of that translated online.

The “Official” Solution Was Dead on Arrival

The university had paid for event-posting software, but club leaders mostly ignored it. They used it out of obligation, not because it worked, and almost no students knew it existed. GroupMe and the social tools peer schools were experimenting with weren’t solving this either: GroupMe had no real concept of a club, and what I heard from friends at other schools suggested they were running into the same gap. Whatever we built would have to succeed where all of these hadn’t, by actually getting used by both sides of the relationship, not just adopted on paper.

Design and Prototyping

Aligning Discovery to How Students Actually Behave

We didn’t land on the final design right away. We went through four real directions before settling on one, usability testing each with three to four students per round.

Event-Centric

Built around the idea that students don't really join clubs, they join events, and the club is just the container. This tracked with research, but club leaders pushed back. They didn't want their club's identity lost in a generic events feed.

Serendipity & Proximity

Surfaced events based on timing and how close you were, trying to recreate that "this is happening right now nearby" feeling. It felt too random. Students had no way to gauge whether they'd know anyone there, so they lacked the confidence to show up.

GroupMe-Style

Casual and informal, built to encourage spontaneous discovery. This was probably the closest to genuinely recreating serendipity, and it did nudge people outside their comfort zone in testing. But it was confusing for students and hard for club leaders to map their events onto.

Club-Centric (the winner)

A browsable events catalog where every event was clearly tied to its hosting club, and each club had its own page linking out to whatever channels it already used to talk to members. We didn't try to replace GroupMe as the communication layer. We focused on the piece that was actually broken: discoverability.

Rollout and Adoption

Partnering for the Club Fair

While we were iterating, we started talking with our student engagement office, sharing research and comparing notes on how to improve the first-year experience. They'd already been evaluating outside vendors for a virtual club fair, and we won that bid, which became our actual launch moment. It gave club leaders a concrete reason to sign up and gave the whole project a real deadline and a real audience.

For the fair itself, we built a scrolling “virtual walk” feed mixing events matching a student’s stated interests with events slightly outside them, recreating some of that in-person serendipity on purpose. Club leaders recorded short elevator-pitch videos that played in the app, and we ran a livestream co-hosted with the student engagement office, spotlighting top clubs to recreate the energy of the in-person event.

Outcomes and Impact

A Virtual Club Fair That Moved the Needle

The club fair worked. We got roughly 300 clubs onto the platform, about 80% of all clubs on campus, and saw 1,600 user signups at peak, out of an undergraduate population of about 6,000.

The fair served as the app's onboarding moment, teaching students how to engage with the platform while giving clubs a stage during their most critical recruitment period, all without a single in-person event.

We missed our own window

We hadn't shipped the features planned for ongoing engagement. Almost all our effort went into solving discovery, and the retention hooks weren't ready in time. Engagement started dropping within about a month of the fair.

Zoom fatigue was real

This was still a fully virtual semester, and clubs across the board were struggling with retention. That wasn't unique to us, but it didn't help. As upperclassmen, our coursework also got more demanding, and we couldn't keep shipping at the pace we needed.

Key Takeaways

A Lesson in Validation Speed

Looking back, the biggest thing I'd do differently is around validation speed. We spent a lot of time building and testing polished prototypes, partly because I wanted to exercise those design and dev skills. That's a fair instinct, but it wasn't the fastest path to an answer.

We could have tested the actual core hypothesis, whether promoting events by timing, proximity, or interest actually drives attendance, using something as cheap as a group-chat experiment, weeks before we ever opened Figma. That would have given us real behavioral data instead of what people told us in interviews about how they’d behave, which we already knew had a gap. There’s no substitute for watching what people actually do.