Seja Housing Website

In response to the uncertainty and stress surrounding housing selection at the Claremont Colleges, our group, Team Seja, created a convenient, user-friendly website for the Maker track that falls under the Beginner Hack and 5C Hack overlays. Our housing selection website aims to ease and improve the notoriously anxiety-inducing housing process for undergraduate students at the Claremont Colleges and make the experience more intuitive and navigable. We built the frontend using Next.js, TypeScript, Javascript, HTML, and CSS, the backend using Python, and connected the two sides with Flask. To use our website, the user simply signs in to their school account (containing information about their name, class year, and housing time) and will be directed to a full map of the campus, where they can click on a specific dorm building to view its detailed floor plan. From there, they can see which rooms they are able to select and which ones are claimed. Students are prioritized based on their room draw times, so those with earlier times can automatically choose from unclaimed rooms and rooms chosen by people with later times. Having recently gone through housing selection ourselves, we recognize how inconvenient the current system is. In the despair-filled days leading up to housing selection, students search dorm reviews and plan with friends, carefully crafting game plans for housing. There has not yet been a site that streamlines the process–until now! Gone are the days where students would count down the seconds until their housing time, scrambling furiously to pick the best option. Our website displays interactive visualizations and real-time updates on room statuses, making the whole process more efficient and straightforward. Looking forward, we envision this platform revolutionizing the room draw process and benefiting students not only within the 5Cs, but also at other schools around the country.