There are a million student centric sites out there, but none of them really help me solve my daily *needs* as a student (housing, books, tuition, transport, etc). To solve these, I still need to go to the middle man (property dealer, college book seller, etc.) who is going to charge me a hefty amount for his services or I need to go around the campus sticking notices so that someone who can fulfill my need can find me. The second option, though tedious, seems to be more reasonable to me why should I pay anyone when all I need to do is just communicate my need to others around the campus and I am sure someone will be able to help me out? Think about it.
I am looking for a room someone around the campus is probably renting out a room too; all I need to do is find him/her. I need to sell a book it is very likely that someone around the campus is looking for the same book; otherwise the book seller would not be making money. I spend 500 rupees on my car fuel everyday commuting to college. Maybe if I share my route with people around my campus, I can do a carpool. And I can go on and on. Crux is that all students have similar needs and the solution to solving those needs lies in nothing else but sharing those needs with each other, so that people with matching needs can find each other (this is what we use *classifieds* for in a newspaper).
The big question is how do I effectively share my needs with others? Is it the campus noticeboard, is it the newspaper, or something else If you observe around, the campus noticeboard is the only useful thing that exists for this purpose today. However, its not used as extensively as it could be. And the reason is that using the campus noticeboard is not as efficient and effective to justify its use.
It takes quite a lot of effort to write a notice, print it and then stick it on multiple noticeboards around campus and even after putting in all that effort, chance of my notice reaching everyone is quite low. It is hardly a matter of time before someone will take off my notice or cover it and even if it does happen to survive, it will only be reaching a limited set of audience who has access to that noticeboard. So if I consider myself to be rational, which I believe would be a fair assumption, the cost of putting a notice on my local campus noticeboard does not justify the return, which explains why I do not use it in solving my day to day problems. So what is the solution? Do I keep paying the middleman or is there something else I can use? The magic word is SearchMyCampus.com.
In today's Web 2.0 world when every student is online scrapping on orkut, I think it would be very useful if I could post my notice in 3 minutes on an online noticeboard and instantly make it visible to everyone around the campus (even to the fachas who have not yet moved to the campus but are planning to in few days). I do not need to print it, I don't need to walk to college, I don't need to guard my notice and I don't need to waste paper. Wow! Then what do I need to do to solve my problems? Two things: a) I need to go to www.searchmycampus.com (my online campus noticeboard), select my campus* and share my need there by posting a notice and b) I need to make students around my campus aware of the site so that I can start getting response to my posts.
So go ahead and share your need now. Share it and I bet you will find it!.
DCE IGNOU University of Mumbai
