StudyPortal — our first major project

The StudyPortal, also known as the “Citadel”, is a one of its kind crowd contributed portal. It is supposed to be for the students, by the students and of the students, acting as a one stop platform for all the study resources that one would need here, at IIT Delhi.

Before StudyPortal, the Board for Student Welfare of IIT Delhi used to maintain an online repository of question papers of each course. But surviving a course at our college requires much more than that. We need access to books, more tutorial problems along with solutions to good problems. But more importantly, the one thing that more than 90% of the junta desires is good lecture notes. There is always one person whose notes are being circulated throughout the campus a week before exams. We thought why stop at just collecting question papers?

So with that idea in mind, I along with some of my friends initiated the construction of this BookShelf. We were just some first year students who were trying to learn something new in the summer of 2017. Web development, version controlling was all new to us, but at the same time, very exciting.

After days of coding, we finally pulled it off - our very own StudyPortal. With our seniors’ help, we hosted it on a virtual machine and since then it has been live on our intranet. Few months later, something came up, which demanded a change in the database organisation and that’s when we came up with a revamped version known as The Citadel.

Our platform is used by almost all the students of our institute, especially during the exams. Some people also message our club saying that Citadel was the most productive thing they saw at the institute. Such support from the community is what pushes us forward, and becomes our spark of hope in times of frustration. We hope to spread the love for technology through many more developments in the years to come.