Big Red Happenings — Campus Event Discovery for Cornell Students

In my first semester at Cornell, I found out — two days after the fact — that a speaker event had taken place on campus featuring Boris Johnson — the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It was exactly the kind of event I would have prioritized. I didn't go because I had no idea it was happening.

When I asked around, I realized this wasn't unusual. The only reliable way to find out about club events at Cornell is to follow the right Instagram accounts — and with 1,000+ clubs, nobody follows them all. Important events were happening every day, and most students were missing most of them.

The flip side was equally real: club organizers were putting serious work into events and getting disappointing turnout — not because students weren't interested, but because they never heard about it. Both sides of the market had the same problem: information wasn't reaching the right people.

From the start I recognized this as a two-sided product. Getting it right meant solving for both users — a student-facing discovery experience and a club-facing submission and promotion tool.

The key product insight: the student's discovery problem and the club's promotion problem are the same problem viewed from opposite sides. Solving one solves the other — but only if both experiences are good enough to create the habit.

I scoped the MVP tightly: build only what was essential to test whether the core product worked. That meant a student-facing event feed, an event detail page, and a club rep submission form. Everything else was explicitly deferred.

The color-coded cards were a deliberate design decision — at a glance, students can visually scan and spot event types they care about without reading every title. Category filters let users narrow further. The whole home screen experience was designed to answer the question "what's happening today?" in under 10 seconds.

Every product has a graveyard of features that seemed important and got cut. Here's what was deliberately left out of v1 and why.

I built Big Red Happenings using React, deployed on Vercel via GitHub. The development approach was iterative — I started with the core feed screen, got it working end-to-end, then layered in the event detail page and submission form. I used Claude as a coding collaborator throughout, which let me move significantly faster than working alone while still understanding every decision being made.

The current version uses static data. The next major technical step is connecting Supabase as the backend — which will replace hardcoded events with a real database, enable the submission form to actually persist data, and lay the foundation for user accounts and RSVP tracking.

The current version proves the core concept works. Here's how I'm thinking about building it out into something students actually use every week.