Mehul Jasti Developed JustLmk so You Can Register for the Courses You Need
Mehul Jasti, a computer science sophomore at Georgia Tech, isn’t leaving his academic goals up to luck. Instead, he developed JustLmk, an application that lets you be the first to know when availability or restrictions change so you can sign up for the courses you need to graduate on time.
“My own experience with course registration at Georgia Tech was my motivation to build JustLmk,” said Jasti, who aims to graduate with a BS/MS in Computer Science in four years, instead of five. “Last year, during course registration, I wasn’t able to get a class I needed, and I had to keep refreshing the course registration system hoping a seat had opened,” said Jasti.
Like a puzzle, figuring out how and when to take your courses based on what is available can be a challenge. In addition to certain courses being offered during specific semesters or having prerequisites, courses also can have major- or year-specific restrictions, so students earlier in their academic coursework can’t just sign up for these courses right away.
“There are prerequisites to prerequisites for courses that can change your graduation date,” said Jasti. “And things close quickly, as quickly as one week.” By Friday, all the courses that you’re looking to sign up for are gone.”
How JustLmk Solves the Registration Puzzle
To help students sign up for the courses they need, Jasti designed JustLmk with accuracy, speed, and flexibility in mind.
Jasti shared that after creating an account, you can choose the term for your next registration on OSCAR at Georgia Tech. “As you view and select courses and sections to get updates on, you can see their restrictions, prerequisites, and student year requirements in the app,” said Jasti.
Then, you can set up notifications for their courses of interest and let JustLmk track their course status for you.
If anything changes, you immediately receive a notification by email or phone when enrollment, waitlists, or course restrictions open, depending on the selections you made.
JustLmk uses push notifications to tell you when courses change, so you don’t have to check your phone every few minutes. Additionally, Jasti has programmed JustLmk to only update data for the specific courses students are looking for, focusing on the courses of interest.
Another way JustLmk supports students is a special feature for finals week that helps them find library study spots based on real-time occupancy data using sensors that Georgia Tech had previously installed in the library.
The power of JustLmk is helping you pick up and complete that missing piece of the puzzle: that difficult-to-get-into course that you need to meet your academic goals. While other course-tracking applications do exist, they have associated costs and limitations on the number of courses you can be watching.
A Track Record of Supporting Students’ Success
JustLmk isn’t the first time that Jasti has applied his interest in computer science to the education sector and supporting students’ success.
In addition to growing up around technology and family members in the computer science field, when Jasti was in 8th grade, he solved a very real problem for his dad, who was running a small teaching business. Jasti saw that his dad was spending about an hour and a half entering the books that he needed to order for students into Excel. “This was my first real introduction to programming where I transferred this data from Excel to another platform,” said Jasti, who used a web automation method and a browser tool to automate the process.
Then, in high school, Jasti continued to use computer science in education, creating a grade-calculator optimization tool to help students check their grades.
Now at university, Jasti acknowledges the value of both academic knowledge and real-world experience in computer science. This is what JustLmk allows Jasti to do, even as a student. “There are a lot of things that I’ve learned by working on JustLmk that are not in courses and vice versa,” said Jasti.
Jasti has been sharing JustLmk with friends to use the app, which is available on the Apple App Store (Android version coming soon), and he is now launching JustLmk to a wider audience.
He’s actively seeking feedback on how the application performs so he can continually make updates to better meet students’ needs. “A friend of mine wanted to take a specific computer science course, and with JustLmk, they added a notification. And when the course restrictions changed, they got a notification, registered, and were able to take the course,” said Jasti.
To do this, Jasti invites students to try JustLmk as they register for their next semester of courses. And if you do use JustLmK, you are encouraged to share what you think about the experience. Whether it’s the features you are looking for, the bugs that you find, or the ideas that will make your course registration process less painful.
In the future, Jasti would like to partner with academic organizations so JustLmk can be available and a sustainable option for more students.
“Registration shouldn’t be pay to win,” said Jasti, “One of my main goals is to keep the app accessible and freely available to everyone.”
