Seth Kinast’s Blog

This post is about pretty ladies that are impressed by computer things. Really. I found some.

So for Pre-Med Club, I’ve written a fairly extensive suite of software for tracking “points” for our members. Basically, members get points for coming to meetings, doing volunteer work, helping committees, etc. These points are tabulated and the person with the most points at year’s end gets a free MCAT prep course from Kaplan; that’s like a $1500 value.

Last year, I was just a member of the Club. Every meeting, we had to write down our names on a sheet of paper when we came to meetings. The secretary would then go match up our names with points and add them into a sheet he kept in Excel. Wow. Talk about taking a long time to get anything done.

This year, I’ve developed a complete system for tracking members and their points. With a couple clicks, you can pull up any information you want— how many points a member has, which meetings they’ve attended, how many people helped at a volunteer event, etc.

The key portion of this system is the card swiper I acquired; it reads OU IDs and inputs them into the system. So for general meetings, I set up my laptop outside the room with the card swiper, and swipe cards as they go by. This eliminates traffic jams caused by having to write out your name completely; it takes less than 2 seconds to swipe an ID card. Plus, there’s no more work to be done; my program tabulates everything else for us!

Obligatory picture here

This has made me popular in no little measure with Justin, our secretary, since it cuts down on his work too

So today’s meeting brought in two Kaplan representatives and a Princeton Review representative. But he was a guy, so we won’t talk about him. Let’s talk about the Kaplan ladies. Kaplan obviously culls these people out based on their personality and attractiveness… let’s just say these ladies had a lot of both they got there before the meeting and were watching as I set my system up. “You guys have a whole system for tracking attendance? We’ve never seen that before!” they chorused. They seemed to really like how it worked and how simple it was to operate. I mean, people have said they thought it was cool and all, but these two ladies loved the idea! They kept talking about how they were going to tell all their coworkers what a neat system we had and how they had never seen one like it, and one even stopped by again AFTER the meeting and said something like “I really am not just saying this, your system is so neat!” They commented that they thought there would be a huge market for a program like that… and who knows? Maybe there would be! I had entertained thoughts of “genericizing” the script, allowing it to be customized… we’ll have to see!

It was so great to get such praise about something I’ve put dozens of hours into. I wish I had time to make it even cooler…

In other news, I got a 100 on my 2nd O-Chem test. Due in no small part to my 11 hours of studying this past weekend. O-Chem eats my brain, but I have vanquished it… for now.