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Duncan-based websites aid students with books, dates

9/23/13 7:00pm

One Duncan College student has gotten creative with his college's website. Matthew Schurr, the Duncan website committee head and webmaster, expanded the Duncan website last spring to include features that all students can use.

Schurr, a Duncan sophomore, is the lead programmer behind the Book Exchange service and the Screw-Yer-Roommate profiles hosted on www.duncancollege.net. 

"We had [over] 1,300 people log in [to the site] with their NetIDs," Schurr said. "Most of [the users] are from Duncan, and we had an even split between the other colleges."



Schurr said Duncan's website committtee chose to expand the site to include a book exchange because of the hassle students experience every semester when purchasing textbooks. He said that although the exchange was available to students late last year, the committee began advertising it more heavily this semester.

"We wanted to make it easier for people to find the books they want to buy [as well as to] sell," Schurr said. "We decided to make our own [book exchange], and it created a lot of value because people could just search and find students who they knew they could trust because they were students at Rice. It just made things a lot easier."

Martel College freshman Neethi Nayak found her textbooks through the site and said the site was particularly useful because she could search for books by course rather the ISBN.

"I was able to purchase my textbook," Nayak said. "It was nice because there was a search engine, and [I knew] what the condition was for the book. I would definitely use the Duncan book exchange applet in the future to buy my textbooks."

According to Schurr, Duncan created a separate site for Screw-Yer-Roommate profiles last year but chose to integrate the service into its main website this year. Schurr said that this year, the site has 122 profiles and approximately 7,000 total profile views. 

Lovett College freshman Aishwarya Thakur said she still appreciated the usefulness of the site. 

"Posting on the site was fun, and I certainly got a lot of people to contact me for my roommate," Thakur said.

Duncan website committee member Sanjay Gadasalli said he worked on providing content for the site. According to Gadasalli, a junior, he and Schurr updated the website last year by changing the format and moving it to Amazon Cloud Drive to improve loading times.

According to Schurr, the book exchange site will be available again next semester, and additional services may be added to the site.

"We are considering expanding the book exchange to encompass other things that students might want to buy like furniture, bikes, etc.," Schurr said. "We know there's other places that offer this, but we believe that students at Rice will be more willing to use our system because access is restricted only to people within the Rice community ..., and we now have a pretty large user-base within Rice, which means people will be more likely to find [buyers and sellers] on our system than anywhere else."

Gadasalli said the website committee has been considering an expansion of the alumni section but is unsure of whether it will continue to supplement Rice Program Council events such as Screw-Yer-Roommate.

"We're looking to offer services to alumni and to students who want to get connected to alumni," Gadasalli said. "In terms of RPC, if we get ideas, we'd love to host them on our website."

 Schurr said he encouraged students to contact him with ideas for other additions to the website. He said he plans to advertise the site more as the committee continues to add more features.

"We want people to use it. It's a kind of network," Schurr said. "The more people who use the services, the more valuable they are. We're also planning on improving the Screw Your Roommate application a lot before next year, taking into the account the feedback we've received from the students who did use it."



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