Hello,

Over the past year and a half we have been working tirelessly at creating InYourClass.com, and we wanted to thank you all for joining us and supporting our project.

IYC started as a simple idea, we wanted to create an app that would allow you to see who’s in your class and ask them for help/advice (homeworks or papers anyone?). We are CCNY students ourselves and although we’ve known each other for a very long time and we spend most of our days together, its pretty obvious that in our campus most students come in, go to class and go on home or to their job. YES, we know that there’s Facebook to get to know people, but our goal was to get to know the people that you took classes with, not the rest of the world. The way we were thinking of it was, we all go to ratemyprofessor to find out about the person teaching the class, what if there was somewhere we could go to see who is in the class as well??

When we released the first version of IYC, it was so basic and cute! It had a simple question “who’s in your class” and it had a craigslist-like bulletin board so that you wouldn’t have to worry about the weirdo’s (IYC was only for CCNY students) and so that you wouldnt have to spend time going through those messy bulletin boards around school, and hopefully save some paper too (we’re big on the environment, the site is green for a reason!)

The first version had some 300 users, mostly our combined friends and friends of friends on campus. Some of them were even professors too. At the end of the semester we asked everyone how we should go about building this app and make it better. We spent the summer of 2010 going through everyone’s feedback. Some members wanted us to make something to replace blackboard, some members wanted email notifications like in facebook, some members wanted group and club pages. After looking at everyone’s ideas we kind of put them all together in one place and what we came up with was something we believe is a really awesome idea!

You see, as students here at CCNY, and it probably is similar in other schools as well, we use Blackboard for our coursework materials, we use OrgSync to charter our clubs, we still have old fashioned bulletin boards that waste hordes of paper for small announcements, and if we want to get any useful information from the school itself we have to look through a messy and static college website. The rest of the information is scattered somewhere between facebook, twitter,  cramster, ratemyproffessor, our notebooks, pieces of paper, flyers and also most likely in our heads. All these things take up soo much time and effort that at the end of the day it just becomes a big mess!! Our idea, or better yet your ideas put together, were to create something that would have all of these parts combined into one website.

Our classes look like little social networks, and instead of you going to check whats happening in your class like on blackboard, we send you notifications. Our clubs pages, although only the first version is out, is designed to work the same way but you get to see all the other clubs on campus, as well as all the other classes. The bulletin board is there too if you want to sell books, rent a room, find jobs, look at activities around campus and much more. Every office and department on campus can create its own page so you can get up to date information and ask about anything you need on the board. The questions are mostly the same, so by looking at the board you would probably even find the answers there, saving everyone time. And if you have personal questions related to you, all you have to do is email someone within the site. We’re soon going to have a mobile app that works both on iphone and android.

Basically the idea is that everything we need to know about the school, and the things we do in school should be in one place!

Now we need your help to make this website better. We want to hear your feedback on what works and what doesnt, how it looks, how we can make it better, if we’re missing something, and also how we can spread the word to the rest of the campus (we’re not good at promoting). We’ve attached a small survey that we hope you can answer.

Please help us get better! Take our survey.

Sincerely,
Arber Ruci, Founder of InYourClass.com