If you’ve already given up on making a schedule before registration because it takes too many clicks to navigate Workday, the folks from RocLab might have something for you.
RocLab is one of the child organizations of the Computer Science Undergraduate Council, a group of students working on improving campus life through building software, as senior Thanothii Ganesh, co-director of RocLab, put it. RocLab works on a new project every year, recruiting students who successfully complete the application process every semester.
Their latest project, proposed in spring 2023 by junior Sung Jae Bae and Michael Giardino ‘23, is Melcourses, a course search tool designed to be more user-friendly than Workday and CDCS.
Melcourses allows students to search and schedule courses, organize selected sections, and identify time conflicts in preparation for the next semester. Ganesh explained that Melcourses is necessary to address the gap presented by the two other applications: It takes too many clicks to create a schedule in Workday, and CDCS, the original course search tool that was developed and is maintained by the University, has an unintuitive user interface that bars students from smoothly scheduling courses.
The Melcourses website has a search and a calendar page to create schedules for different semesters. One of the new features of the website is a personal login — students can create an account to have their schedules saved and shared across all devices, as stated on the Melcourses webpage.
There are also several planned improvements to the platform, such as a four-year plan feature and an integrated cluster search engine.
Melcourses is automatically updated with new courses every day. The website also has a disclaimer to double-check academic requirements on official University resources. According to Ganesh, this disclaimer was put up after the start of the collaboration with the University, when the team reached out to the University requesting more support after the release of the project.
The project was completed just in time for the spring registration. Melcourses was developed by a team of RocLab students, including a developer team led by senior Kayla Lin, a design team led by sophomore Gayatri Shetty, and senior Ginger Li as product manager.
Currently, the team is also working on the advertisement of the project, mainly through flyers around the University and Instagram, where they can be followed @urmelcourses and @roclab_.
