Class Alert

During my undergraduate studies at University of California, Irvine, I encountered many frustrations during the course enrollment process from bad wifi and server crashes, to full courses and stressful waitlisting. During one of these especially bad occurrences where the website for course enrollment kept crashing, I had to spend hours refreshing the page in hopes of being able to claim a spot in an important course. After this experience of countless hours wasted at my computer refreshing a single page, I decided there must be a better solution. I had a vision of building an application that would automatically refresh and view the page for me so I would not have to waste my time doing such a trivial task. After researching and deciding how to build this application, I decided to use a web scraper built for Python to load and refresh the page and detect when the course I wanted opened.

I called this project Class Alerts, and I built it using Python where it would send me an alert through email and text when a course would become available. When the script is run, it takes the Department of your class as input, as well as the course code of the specific class you want in that Department. It gives you the real time info on whether the class is open or not. A time interval for when the script refreshes the page can be set as well as your contact info to ping when the course becomes available.

I found I was very passionate about this project as it was solving a major frustration and issue that I was facing. I found myself so engaged in the project that I would spend hours without even realizing the time was moving by. Solving real-world issues and having important impacts on life was really engaging and thrilling. Even though this project was not highly technical, I learned a lot from it and explored a whole new realm of web scraping. It was a great way for me to apply the knowledge and fundamentals I developed through my courses to the real world.