brennan angelCal Poly students involved in campus clubs and projects now have a new means of communication thanks to the creation of PolyClubs.com, an online directory of clubs that was launched in November 2005.
The Web site was created by three Cal Poly students; Shasta Palmer, Jason Schulberg and Edward Clements, with the goal of improving communication and increasing club membership on campus.
“It’s something that Cal Poly can keep using for years,” said Palmer, an industrial engineering senior.
The site currently has 22 clubs listed, ranging from the Society of Women Engineers to Vines to Wines. Members can post information about club meetings, photos from events and add important dates to the calendar.
“PolyClubs.com is designed to make it easier for students of all majors to get involved with clubs they might not have considered open to them before,” said Schulberg, a mechanical engineering senior.
The Web site was recently approved by the computer science department as a senior project and the creators are hoping to find someone interested in taking over the project.
“There’s a lot that can be done with it if someone had the computer knowledge,” Palmer said.
Palmer visited the career fair last week and handed out over 120 cards about the Web site to potential employers.
“If someone wanted to take (the project) on, it would be worth their while at this point,” Palmer said
A club can be added to the site as long as the member has a Cal Poly e-mail address. Anyone can access the site to look at information right now but that is something the creators want to change.
“I’d like to see it eventually have hidden forms,” Clements, a manufacturing engineering senior, said.
The goal is to have a main form for generic club information and a sub-form for confidential club information, such as research proposals. There are many additional ideas, such as individual club calendars, that the creators hope to see happen with the Web site if someone takes it on as a senior project.
“If we had somebody working on (the Web site) we could give people access to the database,” Clements said.
The site has gathered a lot of support from the city of San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly. There is currently a link to the site on the College of Engineering and the College of Business Web sites. The San Luis Obispo City of Commerce is also adding a link to their Web site.
“It’s been an excellent marketing tool,” Schulberg said.
The Web site is funded by Google. The amount of funding for the site depends on the amount of usage.
“They’re pretty non-obtrusive,” Clements said of the small advertisement that Google has at the bottom of the site’s pages.
Right now the creators said they hope to find someone that knows more about the technical aspects of running a Web site to improve the basic outline that is already there and to promote the site further on campus to add more clubs to the database.
“It’s meant to support the clubs by providing a central location where it’s easy to access information with a couple of clicks,” Palmer said.