Our Pomona is a reworked 5C course search engine created by Joseph Long PO ’14. The site is vastly superior to the search engine Pomona students have been forced to use—until now—on my.pomona.edu.
Pomona’s version is slow, clunky, and generally painful to use. If you accidentally press the “back” button on your browser after searching instead of the site’s “back” link, it all but causes the entire site to crash, and page loading (like on the entire myPomona site) is excruciatingly slow. MyPomona also only allows you to input the two most basic search criteria: semester and course area (department).
Long’s version, on the other hand, is equipped with a whole range of ways to search for your classes. In addition to choosing a department, students can choose which days and times they want the class to meet and can filter the search results by school. Students can also search for classes taught by a particular teacher and with a certain number of total spots in the class.
Perhaps the most helpful new function is the “keyword” input, which allows students to search for classes that deal with a certain topic across all the disciplines.
Long also included an extremely handy schedule design program, in which students can search for classes on the right side of the screen and then select “add to schedule.” Those classes then pop up on a schedule on the right side of the screen, color-coded according to school. The only small complaint with this section is that if your classes overlap, it’s a little hard to see on the schedule.
Overall, Long’s course search is vastly more useful and functional than myPomona’s, and tremendously well-designed.
Long’s course search can be found at http://labs.fairlyawesome.com/ourpomona.