A group of Montreal students have launched a new university-centric website which encourages students to share advice on professors, classes, and student groups.
The site, called UniYu, launched a beta version last week. Unlike existing online resources, which often only focus either on note-sharing or course advice, UniYu hopes to unite a range of information in one easy place. The project’s creators thought there was no unified platform where students could build a profile and interact with students in their classes beyond sharing notes.
One of the project’s co-founders, Michael Shapiro, who graduated from McGill last spring with a degree in mathematics and computer science, spoke about the difficulty some students have with getting involved.
“If you can’t come to Activities Night, you have no way of knowing [what’s going on],” Shapiro said. “I spent four years at McGill and was never part of any clubs, not so much because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know about a lot of them.”
As with any online service, attracting users has been a difficult task. UniYu’s content is entirely user-generated, and encouraging users to contribute to an empty site is no easy feat.
“Getting people to sign up is the major hurdle. If everyone used it, it would be amazing and it would be such a great tool,” Shapiro said. “We’re hoping we can convince students. Yeah it’s empty and no one is using it yet, but if you convince other people to start using it you can really build a great community.”
Shapiro and the project’s creators hope to entice students with innovative features like a location-based chat platform.
“We’ll be launching a new feature called UniTalk, where you can live chat in your classroom or in the library,” he said. “If you’re in a 600-person class and you’re sitting in the back and you can’t see something [on] the board, you can type in [a question] and somebody will answer you.”
Shapiro hopes that one day UniYu might be a one-stop resource for student advice.
“That’s an ideal goal. It’s a dream and everything, but I’d love for UniYu to become the one place you go for whatever you need.”
