Arbitrary apps do more harm than good for student communities
By GEETIKA MAHAJAN — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
Good ideas are never unique for long. If a product, service or project is valuable, it’s logical that people and organizations adopt it en masse. Such is the reasoning behind the success of online shopping and asset-backed securities; if it’s clear that something brings measurable, positive value, people will want it in their lives and it will become more common.
Eventually, however, such things reach a tipping point, like the dot-com bubble bursting or the stock market crashing in 2008. Exposure leads to mass proliferation and oversaturation, and — as the saying goes — too much of a good thing is bad. It’s hard to see the scale tipping when you’re in the middle of it, but in hindsight, it’s clear that too many people were attempting to capitalize on a perceived profit, which cheapened any initial benefit.
Similarly, the idea of coding and distributing an app to the student body is attractive; it’s an (ostensibly) mutually beneficial project in which students receive a resource and developers get to pad their resumes. Unfortunately, it’s become so attractive that many coding clubs, rather than inspiring genuine innovation and collaboration amongst students, are starting to become more of a nucleus for making your GitHub accounts look just a little more stacked.
The apps themselves aren’t inherently bad, and the issues that they aim to resolve are not trivial. The problem is that when an app is dispassionately coded to solely be a resume booster, it takes away what makes these clubs so important — that they aim to inspire and mentor students before they enter the technical field. The point of a tech club (or any club, for that matter) is to collaborate and come away having learned something through shared experience, which is more difficult to do when the membership requirement is akin to that of the professional market.
Your university years are valuable; college is one of the only times in your life when you’ll have the time and resources to work on passion projects and find large groups of people who are willing to work on them with you. In such moments, pushing your creativity and looking for new ways to inspire change may have more of a benefit than merely following in the footsteps of someone who came before you.
I see QR codes for student-coded apps at almost every bulletin board on campus, yet I’m rarely inclined to download them. Student “activism” clubs make websites for “resources,” yet I’ve never felt that any of them displayed information that wasn’t otherwise widely available. The exigence for such apps may have come from good will, but they aren’t making any measurable impact within the student community — and it starts from an ideation process that looks for external rewards rather than community or creativity. Thus, we have an oversaturation of apps and websites that just take up space in the virtual world, without having any impact on the outside — a dangerous way to start your professional journey, regardless of where you’re trying to go.
Written by: Geetika Mahajan — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
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