There’s nothing more relaxing to do during a hot summer day than lounging around the pool. And now you can do it online via atthepool.com, a recently launched social platform.

On Aug. 27, UC Davis students are invited to attend the exclusive launch of At The Pool (ATP for short) by signing up at ATP’s website. Then, students can request an invite using “UC Davis” as their invite code.

ATP was founded by Alex Capecelatro, a UCLA alumnus who graduated with a degree in materials engineering. He said that the site’s name references the pool because it uses the concept of “pools,” which is one of the site’s many functions meant to help people meet others who share similar likes. The site’s goal is to make daily introductions for its users with fellow classmates they’ve never met before on campus.

Though the initial meet-greet would be online, Capecelatro said that the hope is that it will ultimately cultivate into a group of compatible individuals who will meet up for outside excursions, such as catching that movie you really want to see but your friends aren’t as eager to.

Capecelatro got the idea for ATP when he was working at a tech startup in New York after graduation. During that time, he said he felt disconnected from everything around him and struggled to bond with new people.

“It was difficult meeting new people and it wasn’t until I was about to move that I serendipitously met someone at a diner who works in tech and shared a number of my interests,” Capecelatro said.

Once he moved back to California, he found himself in the same isolated position again, looking to connect with people who shared his own interests. He wondered why it was so hard to meet people who liked the same things as he did and stay in contact as well.

“I realized the Internet does a great job at connecting us with our friends and family, but a terrible job at introducing us to new people and getting us offline,” Capecelatro said. “Oddly, this is what Facebook used to be good at when it first started at colleges. It doesn’t do this anymore and it’s still incredibly tough to find like-minded classmates and we realized [ATP] would be a great tool for students.”

Jason Hsin, lead designer on ATP, studies entertainment design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. and has worked with ATP since its start. Hsin had a problem not unlike those of Capecelatro in that it was difficult to meet anybody outside his social circle who shared similar interests. Coincidentally, the two connected over the “same obscure passion for Flatland BMX.”

“This led us to the idea of remedying the problem that social networks were built to remedy in the first place: to actually connect you with other people you want to meet in real life,” Hsin said.

Hsin’s design for ATP is radically different from the familiar layouts of major social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter which often consist of a never-ending news feed, endless photos which are updated constantly and of course, a chat application similar to instant messaging.

“You don’t get to know someone by scrolling through an endless feed of inconsequential updates and check-ins to Starbucks. We center our design around making it clear to you why you’re being matched with someone through such factors as mutual friends and giving you a feel for their personality through fun and quirky Q&As. If you want to converse with your match, you have to be viewing their profile,” Hsin said. “We break the monotony and oversaturation of current social networks by focusing on singular but meaningful interactions.”

ATP introduces a new person to each user every 24 hours so matches don’t linger for too long.

Julia Rockwell, event coordinator at the University of Connecticut branch of ATP, got involved with ATP when she saw a flyer for the beta site which went by its testing name, Hyphos.

“I created a profile out of curiosity. Alex messaged me almost instantly as he’s very friendly and wanted to know my opinions on the site. We started talking and hit it off right away as we had many overlapping ideas on how to improve people’s lives with technology and more communication channels,” Rockwell said. “I believe in striving to make the world better, and as a communications major, I love studying how people interact with each other, so the ability to improve people’s interactions and social lives was a perfect fit.”

Rockwell said that she too had the desire to befriend new people and that the ingenuity of ATP was that it used the Internet to encourage people to turn off their computers and plan outings together in the real world.

“It’s different since it’s a step forward, working to get people over the stigma of meeting new people from ‘the Internet.’ I believe this stigma comes partially from skepticism and fear but the majority of people using the Internet are sane,” Rockwell said. “I hope [the stigma] starts to fade, as we deserve a means to meet one another offline and use the Internet as a tool to enrich our lives offline.”

MICHELLE RUAN can be reached at features@theaggie.org. 

Everyone looks forward to summer. Warm weather, no classes, maybe a tropical vacation and time to sleep in. But for a group of UC Santa Barbara students, such expectations were nonexistent this summer.

This summer, the Nourish International UC Davis chapter teamed with UC Santa Barbara to send a group of students to Nepal for three weeks to help local students.

Nourish International is a student-founded and student-run nonprofit organization that was first created under the name Hunger Lunch in 2003, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

To raise awareness about poverty, students served rice and beans for lunch on campus and the proceeds were put toward a project to help people suffering from malnourishment in India. After such a success, the students continued the program and rebranded it as Nourish International.

Kelly Phoenix, a UNC graduate, was part of Nourish as a college student and is now the current executive director due to her passion for combating poverty.

“Nourish International engages students and empowers communities to make a lasting impact on extreme poverty,” Phoenix said. “The students run social businesses on their campuses and they invest the funds that they earn on sustainable development projects during the summer in the developing world.”

The project in Nepal this summer was derived from the idea that athletics should be linked with education, so the students devised a plan to build a soccer field, along with various other services, at a school in Arupokhari-1, Nepal.

Third-year global studies major Miya Sommers of UC Santa Barbara was able to shed some light on the project that is still going on overseas.

She said that they had some difficulties thinking of a project that would fit all of their criteria.

“We wanted to find something community-based and has the students actively playing a role,” Sommers said. “There were other things that were crucial to development too; you want it to be something that is long-term and would mean something to the community.”

While the Nourish chapter at UC Davis played a major role in the project and the fundraising, none of the UC Davis students were able to make the trip this summer. However, new chapter director and senior sociology major Kimberly Chavarria said that she hopes to recruit more people into the program and wants to makethe Nourish name more well-known around campus.

The chapter was established in 2009 and in the past has held multiple trips for its members to help those in Ecuador, but switched it up this year to raise funds for Nepal.

UC Davis students helped to raise money in an online fundraiser called the Global Giving Challenge, in which the Nourish chapters of all 29 universities competed to raise the most money. UC Santa Barbara landed in fourth place.

“We were able to raise $3,000 with the help of the UC Davis chapter and that was momentous because when we started it was a bad economic time,” Sommers said.

When the group of nine arrived in Nepal, they not only built a soccer field, but also brought jerseys and cleats to distribute to the school children. On top of that, they donated books and organized the school library, painted the school, taught a computer class for the teachers and taught English to the students.

While there were many successes with the project, some problems did arise.

“This is our first project ever and I don’t think we got the community as involved as we should have, which is critical to making this a long-term project,” Sommers said. “I don’t think we planned it out environmentally, economically and socially-sustainable for the school.”

Sommers said that another problem was the language barrier, which definitely made things more difficult but also served as an important part of the learning process.

“I think it’s really good to gain that appreciation for another language,” Sommers said. “But it’s also hard because you want to share your experiences and ask questions and if you can’t do that you feel really muted and limited. That’s why it was good that we went as a group. We could experience life in Arupokhari-1 and then go to someone’s room and talk about it.”

While a main part of Nourish is to help those suffering malnourishment and poverty, the students gain a lot from their experiences as well.

“They immersed themselves in the community they were staying in in Nepal,” Phoenix said. “One of the key tenets of Nourish International is that it’s a partnership between the community and the students and that they each have something to learn from each other.”

Many of those involved felt this “cross-cultural experience,” Sommers said. While the goal of the project was to help the people of the village of Arupokhari-1, she said she thought that they helped her even more.

“I feel like they have helped me so much. They didn’t know me or what I was going to do, but they welcomed me into their house and shared their experiences,” Sommers said. “The children were so loving and I think that changed me because I realized that every child is so special. Even in our own backyard we need to invigorate these children because they are the change-makers and the most important thing for our world right now.”

DEVON BOHART can be reached at features@theaggie.org.

As climbing tuition costs continue to dominate headlines, some students are trying out new ways to save money. But rather than sacrificing your more luxurious and perhaps expensive tastes, just brown-bag it.

Bringing your own lunch isn’t a new idea, but it is new to many students, many of whom have usually eaten lunches provided by their school cafeteria or have had the luxury of parent-packed lunches.

However, the college lifestyle can be considered the first step toward being a certifiable “grown-up.” There is little to no parental supervision and students who never had to cook, do laundry or clean the house before suddenly find themselves thrust into these responsibilities. Add in a basic course load, extracurricular activities and maybe even a part-time job and the hours seem to be going by a lot faster.

Thus, many students would rather buy their lunch or dinner than actually cook something, as it involves an additional routine of a trip to the local supermarket for groceries, cooking the meal and then finally washing the dishes.

You may think that $1.75 for a large slice of cheese pizza from Ciao at the CoHo sounds like a great deal compared to all the work that goes into cooking. It’s a favorite meal choice of many students. A week’s lunch of cheese pizza slices then comes out to about $9.

However, the food pyramid advises that a week’s worth of cheese pizza slices is in no way a balanced meal, so occasionally, there might be rotation in food choices such as a CoHo salad or a $6.75 hamburger from Burgers and Brew for another day. Eventually, these prices do add up and one can spend around $30 for an entire week’s worth of lunches. That is a figure that many students would rather spend on something else, or save for a rainy day.

Vinson Banh, a fifth-year human development major, brings sandwiches to school instead of purchasing them. Banh believes it to be a much healthier option to bring one’s own lunches.

“Instead of going to the CoHo where the grease on the pizza is enough to soak up two napkins, a nice sandwich would be a lot better. In addition, I would be saving a lot of money instead of shelling out five to seven dollars on lunch,” Banh said.

So, in an effort to curb extraneous spending, more and more students like Banh are discovering the financial benefits of packing their own lunches.

These homemade lunches are not anything grand, as they usually consist of several sandwiches hastily prepared the night before or plastic containers of dinner leftovers. But dinner leftovers are a great way of stretching groceries for more than one meal a day, thus contributing to the financial benefits of brown-bagging.

But sometimes it’s hard to find even a few minutes to make a sandwich in the mornings or at night after a long day.

Victoria Chen, a third-year neurobiology, physiology and behavior major, admits she brings lunches to school sporadically as it depends on how much homework, studying and club activities she has, which is often a lot.

“I wouldn’t mind bringing my own lunch more often but it’s really hard to do when you don’t have a lot of time,” Chen said.

However, she did say that eating homemade food does have its benefits, such as serving as a comfort food.

“Bringing my own lunch makes me less homesick because ethnic foods make me feel a lot more comfortable and happy,” Chen said.

Gloria Huerta, a third-year biochemistry major with an emphasis in molecular biology, echoes Chen’s thoughts about bringing lunch. Huerta also has hard courses and a part-time job at the library, which doesn’t leave her with a lot of time to pack her lunch, even though she’d like to.

“I don’t bring lunch, but if I had time, I would definitely do it. It’ll probably save me money in the long run. But now, I either buy lunch or if I have a break in between classes, I go home and eat something real quick,” Huerta said.

Charles Lam, a third-year human development major, also said that he is fairly busy, but whenever he goes home, his mother makes him lunch, with food that she has prepared and packed in containers for him.

“It’s great that I get food from home because it’s healthy — usually, I have rice, some sort of meat and vegetables,” Lam said. “[Also,] bringing your own lunch to school saves a lot of money because you can pack according to how much you eat; sometimes when you purchase food, you get too much or too little.”

MICHELLE RUAN can be reached at features@theaggie.org.