Deciding which classes to take, what professors to sign up for and finding information on what a class is like is a process all UTD students face at the start of each semester. Nebula Labs, a large group of student developers and designers at UTD, relaunched its class selection tool UTD Trends on Oct. 8, aiming to create an easier-to-navigate experience for students researching classes. The relaunch comes less than a month before spring 2025 course registration begins.
Trends is a website that consolidates information from Rate My Professor and grade distribution data from UTD since 2017 all into one place. Users can look up a course and see which instructors teach it, what grades students tend to receive, previous students’ reviews of each instructor and more. Originally released Dec. 2023, Trends underwent a recent rebranding that improved its navigability and ease of use. Abhiram Tadepalli, Trends’ project manager and computer science sophomore, said the goal of Trends is to help students first and foremost.
“We really want to serve the students and that’s what the core mission of Nebula Labs always has been,” Tadepalli said. “All our projects are geared towards making sure that students have everything they need with the data that we have.”
Tyler Hill, Nebula Labs’ vice president and computer science senior, said that Nebula originally branched off UTD’s student-run Association for Computing Machinery to make a degree planner and expanded into more projects afterward. Nebula has since created projects such as Jupiter, which keeps up with student events and organizations, and maintained its extensive degree planner tool. Following the Trends website’s relaunch, the class selection tool has seen over 2,000 users.
The current president of Nebula, marketing senior Frances Hill, is continuing the work on Trends. She said that Trends is all about simplifying class registration, a process that needs to go fast but can easily grow complicated by requiring students to open dozens of tabs and multiple websites to access the information they need, and that the need for Trends is clear in UTD’s student community. Out of all of Nebula’s projects, Trends had the largest number of new contributors sign up to work on it during recruitment. Both Tyler Hill and Tadepalli got started at Nebula by working on Trends.
“Technically, there’s not a lot of difference in the coding aspect of Jupiter and Trends, but everyone wants to do Trends,” Frances Hill said. “I think it just shows that it’s a necessity and needed and people want to put effort into it.”
Trends got its name from how it collects class data, normally spread across multiple websites or unavailable without requests, and creates trends over time that students can learn from. Tadepalli said Trends is something that UTD students have been lacking for a while until the students themselves stepped up to provide it, and that it’s far from complete. Trends will continue to be developed under Nebula, with plans to add additional features like class scheduling.