If Stony Brook students wanted to go to a central online location to buy or sell books, find carpool rides, join a study group, locate tutors and more they now have a new website to go to, connectatstony.com.
Last semester, senior computer science majors GyungJin Lee, Dongri Zhu, Akshay Veloor and Tin Aung Khine were working on a small-scale project in their software engineering class. This project eventually developed into what is now known as connectatstony.com.
“Students on campus can reach out to a source where all students can reach out to for anything,” Khine said. He said he compared [email protected] to Facebook. “When Facebook started at Harvard, they really had pride that their campus had this social networking and that it grew to other colleges, and eventually expanded to the world. We want something for our campus as well, contribution from the students.”
This semester the site went live and read with this prominent statement, “It is with pride to launch this website and promote about our campus. This certainly is an achievement to Stony Brook University.”
The connectatstony.com website along with the Facebook friend “Connect At Stony” provides a variety of helpful tools. The Facebook friend tends to be the major attractor of students with 775 friends and growing. However the team wants the students to go further than simply adding the friend. They want students to then go on the website.
Connectatstony.com offers a variety of services. These include, but are not limited too, car pools, study groups, housing options, buying/selling books, tutoring, announcements, and club activities.
“Connectatstony.com covers everything a student needs,” said Khine.
Rebecca Sadique added the Facebook page as a friend. “I saw that a lot of my friends added connectatstony, so I added connectatstony too,” said Sadique, a marine-biology major who hasn’t used the group for anything yet, but would in the future.
The team that pulled connectatstony together this semester is now all seniors, but the group won’t disappear when they graduate.
“Just because we are graduates, were not going to stop,” Khine said.
Looking to the future the team is “waiting for the day during orientations when students come in and if they have any questions they would hop on connectatstony.com.”