StudentFirst

STUDENTFirst was my capstone for the Brooklyn College TTP Residency Program, and it is still one of the projects I care about most. For years I had wanted a calmer, more student-shaped alternative to CUNYFirst for enrolling and managing courses at CUNY. The capstone was the first time I could try to build that idea for real.

The app is a responsive, student-first enrollment and course management experience. The goal was to reduce the friction people hit in the official flow: clearer paths, less clutter, and screens that assumed you were a student trying to get something done, not an admin tool dressed up for everyone.

Technically, it pulled together almost everything from the program:

1. React for the interactive UI.
2. Redux for state across views and complex data flow.
3. Express on the server for routing and business logic.
4. Firebase for auth and a realtime-friendly data layer.
5. A REST API between client and server so the front end stayed decoupled from persistence.

Building it forced tradeoffs I had only read about before: scalability, security, performance, and how much complexity belongs in the client versus the server. The lesson that stuck longest was user-centered design. When I imagined the actual enrollment rush and weekly planning, feature order and screen layout got a lot easier to justify.

Looking back, the capstone was more than a finale to school; it was a stepping stone into full-stack development. I got hands-on experience building a full web application from the ground up, and the skills from that stretch have stayed valuable through everything that came after.