At the beginning of the semester, I received an email from an unfamiliar website advertising that it could help me meet people and discuss course material with other students. I first thought it was a spam mail, but upon further examination, I decided to take a look at what the website, StudyRoom, had to give.

What I saw on the website wasn’t extremely impressive. It looked simple, but I personally had not expected much; I thought the email had just been another useless advertisement. However, as the semester progressed, I saw that many students were using this website, and it was helping them after class.

StudyRoom, a student connection website, proved to be quite more useful than I had initially thought. I don’t see any harm in students trying it out and getting an idea of how helpful the site can be.

At a college as big as the University, it is rather helpful for students taking the same course to get together and talk about the course material. Some lecture classes are so big the opportunity to ask questions is nearly nonexistent. With busy schedules and the occasional inability to attend professors’ office hours, it is quite easy to feel desperate and discouraged when there is an urgent question on a specific course that needs to be answered. 

StudyRoom takes care of all such problems. Students can set up profiles, select courses they are currently taking and instantly have access to an open discussion about their courses. There, they can ask any questions they may have.

Every now and then, a question from a classmate pops up on my StudyRoom class pages. I currently have Environmental Economics, Introduction to Computing and a few other courses added to my personal StudyRoom account, and the aforementioned two courses have very active students posting questions and tips very frequently. 

For example, someone in the Environmental Economics course asked, “What is the Coase theorem?” The student had missed it in class, and other students on the site provided a better explanation than one could find via Google. 

These questions could have been asked to the professor either during class or during office hours, but such opportunities do not always arise. Some students are either just too shy to ask questions — me being one of them — or just too busy to go to office hours, maybe because they have class or other commitments. 

In such cases, it would be much more comfortable for the students to just post a question online and wait for someone to answer it. 

StudyRoom also offers a less formal environment than Compass2g, which doesn’t always have a place for students in every class to ask questions. 

I sometimes have problems with the courses that I take, and with the classes strangely intertwined so as to make office hours unavailable for me for the whole week, I have no way to ask questions except after class, which is still quite tight on my schedule. I have classes that closely follow each other until the end of the day.

With such difficulties at hand, I find StudyRoom very handy. Other students might know something I do not, and I can also help others with things they might not know about. I see students sharing notes, asking questions, arranging meeting times, even discussing in-depth material that was not necessarily covered in class on the site.

StudyRoom serves as a perfect occasional substitute for professors. It is available all the time, and many students are willing to share their knowledge on course materials. And such questions do not necessarily have to be about course material; students who have never met each other in courses with many people are also able to arrange studying times to get together and meet offline, which is certainly an efficient way to share knowledge.

Of course, StudyRoom is not without its problems. Not very many people know about the system, and even people who do know StudyRoom do not always participate actively in discussions. The difference between those on the site and those who aren’t is who ignored the emails sent out by StudyRoom and those who tried it out. Even my friends do not know much about this website, which actually has been helping me a great deal.

It has much potential, as courses gradually become more difficult over time. The accumulation of knowledge would be evident as more students join the network. It would help the general student body benefit from the database of knowledge, in addition to helping those new to the site. If more students join, the website would prove to be an even more useful resource than it already is.

Yunjo is a freshman in Engineering. He can be reached at [email protected].