College students are no stranger to the trials and tribulations of online class registration. The process is often slow, navigating clunky technology while racing against other students to secure your seats.

Enter SearchNEU – a web app created by Ryan Hughes, a fourth year computer science student at CCIS – that allows users to search Northeastern’s course catalog for everything you’d need to know to register for classes in 4 milliseconds or less.

“I was registering for classes, but a section I wanted was full,” said Hughes. “I contacted the registrar to see if there was anything I could do, they said to keep checking back until a seat opened up. Then I realized I could write a computer program to do that.”

Hughes has been tinkering with computer science since his teen years, motivated by a robotics competition he entered just outside of Philadelphia, where he grew up. Hughes said he’s always worked on side projects, but has focused on SearchNEU on a bigger scale.

Between classes and co-ops at Google and Snapchat, SearchNEU had been an on and off project since the beginning of 2016. Hughes spent this summer working on the project, soliciting feedback from friends and other students before releasing it to the world.

“I was scraping all this data from the Northeastern website, and realized I could do so much more with it,” Hughes said. “There are lots of other schools doing something similar… I’ve been working with a group from Johns Hopkins to compare and share features.”

SearchNEU is an open-source project, and is currently maintained by Hughes who is looking for more contributors. His brother, a sophomore computer science student across the river at Harvard, designed the website.

The responsive web app is written in node.js and react.js, and hosted on Amazon Web Services to scrape data from Northeastern’s website every 24 hours. “Thousands of schools use the same system as Northeastern – Banner – so anyone can pick it up and implement it at their school,” said Hughes.

“It’s gotten over 2000 unique visits since I started spreading it in August, and we get about 30 to 40 views every day,” said Hughes.

Users can submit feature requests via GitHub, but Hughes already has a long list of goals in his vision. He is hoping to work with another student who has done another project using Trace evaluations, and wants to integrate that data as well as information from external website ‘ratemyprofessor’ to help students learn more about their professors when they’re signing up for classes.

Hughes prides himself on the speed and efficiency of SearchNEU, which is a fairly common pain point among systems of this nature. “It doesn’t have too many features, but what it can do, it does well,” said Hughes.

Other wishlist features include the addition of information such as textbook requirements, campus map, a schedule builder, an index of student organizations, as well as the ability to filter courses based on pre-requisites or other criteria. “There’s another school in Canada that has a program where you can copy and paste your degree audit, and all the right classes will show up,” said Hughes.

Hughes has met with faculty to look into whether or not the university will be able to officially support the project, but as of now Hughes is very motivated by his passion project.

Outside of classes, Hughes is a member of the recreational rock climbing club and NU Hacks – a student club dedicated to bringing together those interested in computer science.

Hughes said he is unsure as to what the future holds in terms of a career path, but is exploring different options through his projects. “I want to make stuff that hasn’t been done before, tools to help people out. I want people to say ‘hey – I’d use this every day!’”.