University Academic Calendar

An automatically generated calendar with important university dates.

One of the projects I worked on as a student worker that has proved to have the most significant impact was creating an academic calendar page. The main idea was that a lot of the important dates for university operation were based on consistent rules, but each year they would have to manually determine the dates and publish an academic calendar based on them. The goal of the project was to switch this to an automatically generated calendar system, which could be published on the website, and would consistently match the calendars that are approved by the administration.

To this end, I worked with the registrar office on formalizing all of the rules that existed for siginificant dates of the university, and combined them with the rules that exist for many of the holidays and recesses that occur throughout the years. From there I built a system that could automatically generate a full semester of dates at a time, and be easily embedded onto the university's web pages. This included filtering functionality, allowing the user to narrow down to only the dates they were interested in.

Additional features that were implemented were allowing manually entered dates for events that didn't follow an exact rule, and generating many different formats for the calendar to be available in. These formats included offering an iCal feed, as well as the ability to add the filtered calendar feed to a person's google calendar, so they could see university dates alongside their own personal dates and events.

This is one of the most impactful projects I worked on as a student worker, because it is used by students and across many departments of the university for scheduling and planning purposes. There have been countless occasions as a student where I entered a classroom or office and saw the calendar I had made opened up or being referenced, which was consistently rewarding.