On Building Varsify

 

About a month ago or two, We launched Varsify, with the sole intent of making university applications as seamless as possible, allowing matrics to apply to all, well almost all universities in SA.

This was the first collaborative work we did as Geekulcha Student Society UCT, and we had a chance to partner with WolaPantsula; an organization based in Cape Town that assists high school students, mostly matrics, our vision aligns with theirs, so we were able to work together.

Initially, it was just me, Given and Comfort,  a little bit of background Given been running a Facebook page since 2019 helping high school students with their university application and inquiries, this was a tedious process and that's where the idea of a centralized service that prospective students can use to apply to all universities came about.

We joined the MTN Business Hackathon in August, it was a crazy experience  from new bugs popping up to being chased out of the CS Building and having to code in the toilets, Our overall Hackathon journey can be summed up by this thread Given made

 

the security came and kicked us out of the room we were in. Mind you, it was raining, and it was just time for us to start uploading. so we quickly ran to the toilets, from one building to another, hoping to get time and venue for the last 20 some minutes left for the hackathon. pic.twitter.com/Zwcy2kqfko

— Sir G 👑👑👑 (@Given_kibanza) August 12, 2021

 

Throughout all that, we went home with a Certified L, but we did learn a valuable lesson which; It doesn't matter sometimes how good your ideas are, but you must be able to sell them.

The project required a lot of work not necessary the coding part but the data management, from ensuring that the university data we have is up-to-date to verifying user-uploaded data but fortunately the Geekulcha UCT team pitched up, and we were able to split the workload accordingly, I myself honestly didn't want to deal with the admin work…bro that's tedious, but we have to do what we have to do and ensure that all applicants' information is verified.

I didn't realize how delicate and sensitive what we were doing up till we started meeting up organizations that work closely with matric students; These students would be entrusting us, our system with their future and data, so we had to make our system reliable and another thing is that I wasn't familiar with the nitty-gritty of building a platform which is so close to user's personal data, I had spent quite some time learning about lawfully ways of processing and protecting user's personal information, also the knowledge and precautions I learnt from building varsify kinda carried over to how we process and store user data at SmartStudent.

All said and coded, This was a great initiative, and we hope to continue making University applications easily accessible to everyone.