At SMUMods, we aim to make the lives of students better. We ask ourselves how we can help the SMU community; as long as there is a need, the team will try its best to implement the most viable solution. Below, you will see ‘batches’ of intakes in chronological order, starting from the very first team.
On one eventful day in the Summer of 2018, Gabriel, Sherman and Zachery met and talked about creating a platform for SMU students. They shared the same goal — they wanted to make the lives of students better. Bidding was an issue and asking around for a good professor takes up a lot of time and effort. They knew what they wanted to build and set-off to learn as much as they could to develop the SMUMods website. SMUMods was launched on the 1st of July 2019. They did Reviews and Books over 2 summers and even created their own company to use SMUMods as their internship requirement. At this time, the Starbucks Card campaign was used to bring in our very first group of users and we achieved close to 500 reviews.
Sherman Koa
Devops/Sponsor
SIS Student of 2016
After the release of SMUMods, 2 more members joined the team. Nicholas wanted to learn about our backend infrastructure and Sarah wanted to do UI design. They spoke with the core team and spent their summer helping the team with an upcoming feature — Events. The Events prototype was born at this time but was later parked and postponed.
Nicholas Foo
Backend
SIS Student of 2016
Sarah Tan
UI/UX Designer
SOCSCI Student of 2016
As the core team was graduating soon, they needed more members to take over them. They pitched a recruitment talk to a group of people and managed to gain some new members and more. SMUMods Books was born at this time and this batch witnessed how it was pushed out.
During the Summer of 2020, Jia Cheng and Cindy worked together and built SMUMods Analytics, an interactive visualization dashboard to visualise historical bidding data from the BOSS Results page. With some help and guidance from the team, they managed to launch the feature on 23 June 2020, just in time before the start of the AY 2020-21 Term 1 bidding period.
Qi Long
Frontend
SIS Student of 2019
Due to COVID-19, there would be lesser interactions between students as orientation camps and classes shift online. Hence, the team wanted SMUMods to be the platform to connect students wherever they are, even beyond bidding. To do so, they recruited members and formed a marketing team.
Within a month, the team grew its social media to over 1,000 followers and secured partnerships with SMUSA and other CBDs such as OIKOS and ASOC. They managed to increase the number of reviews from 600+ to 1100+ as part of a marketing campaign right before the BOSS bidding window opened. To ensure financial sustainability, the team also raised over $100 in donations from the SMU community, and secured over $1,000 sponsorship deals. The efforts from this team helped to cope with our operation costs such as server and other necessary costs to keep SMUMods running.
