Meet the Team 👋

Design Lead: Shayla Ho

Tech Leads (2): Ethan Ho, Steven Zhou

Designers (4): Jocelyn Phan, Claire Phan, Noah Tizon, Elise Alinsug

Developers (14): Adarsh Venkateswaran, Aditya Agrawal, Alex Espejo, Alyssia Tan, Angelina Wang, Bowen Wang, Boyuan Liu, Brandon Peng, Dang Nguyen, Elliot Escalante, Joshua Sullivan, Priyansh Shah, Raymond Yan, Ryan Su

What is Center Stage? 🪭

Established in 2024, Center Stage (CSE) is a nonprofit dance organization that offers free traditional Chinese dance lessons, among a variety genres, to promote cultural heritage and foster youth development. Through a variety of dance classes and performance opportunities, Center Stage empowers its students to connect with their culture and develop their dance skills.

The Problem 😵‍💫

Our early user research involved interviews with Center Stage students and administrators, where we aimed to understand the scope of the problem they faced. Afterwards, we applied a variety of user research methods, including an affinity diagram and multiple personas. These design artifacts assisted our team with identifying core issues with Center Stage’s operations.

Manual and Unstructured Workflows

All major tasks, such as registration, event tracking, and attendance, were managed informally through spreadsheets and WeChat communication. These methods led to a lack of organization and a heavy administrative burden for teachers. Oftentimes, “class moms” manually took attendance, resulting in varied data regarding student class attendance. Students were expected to remember class schedules shared sporadically in group chats, and important performance information was not communicated at sign-up.

“You basically just have to remember it for yourself.” -Grace, former CSE student

Inefficient Attendance Tracking

There was no consistent method for logging who attended classes or performances. Attendance was often noted informally or retroactively, and data was not stored in any centralized or easily accessible system. This made it difficult for instructors to evaluate student engagement.

This set of problems made our goal clear: reduce reliance on manual processes, and create a seamless, user-friendly experience to meet the needs of students, teachers, and administrators.

The Solution 💡

The team was tasked to design an application that would support three audiences: students, teachers, and administrators.

Students:

A mobile application that allows students to create a “Student” account to efficiently sign up for classes/events and keep track of their schedules. Through the application, students are able to easily manage their upcoming events as well as see their attended history.

Teachers:

A mobile application that allows teachers to create a “Teacher” account to create and manage their classes. Through the application, teachers are able to seamlessly create classes/events and view RSVP status of students. With auto-generated QR codes, the check-in process is expedited, leaving more time for learning.

Administrators:

A desktop application that allows administrators to view attendance analytics, manage their teaching staff, and oversee all classes in the program. It acts as a centralized hub for all program analytics for admins to use in ensuring everything runs smoothly.

Features 🌟

Student End

• Class and Event Enrollment: Students can discover and enroll in corequisite classes and events and sign up for them all at once. This tackles CSE’s problem of event management and decreases the amount of manual communication needed to announce these events to students.

• Resources: Students can also view resources organized by their classes and dance genres. This is helpful for students who may have missed a class or students looking for resources their teachers recommend.

Teacher End

• Create classes/events & Digitized Student check-in: Teachers can create classes/events, post them quickly, and check in their students all in one app. This helps centralize the event creation and management in one place, making it easier for teachers to focus on their class material than the logistics.

• Upload Resources: Teachers can easily create and upload resources for their students to further enhance their learning experience. Being able to tag a specific class or dance genre reduces manual communication between multiple students and saves time on the teacher’s end.

Admin End

• Dashboard Analytics: Administrators can easily view event and attendance analytics on a user-friendly dashboard on a desktop view. They can also access all class, teacher, and student information, which reduces the need for manual entry and organization.

Design Process 🎨

• Affinity Diagram: used to empathize and identify pain points that primary users are currently facing
• Personas: used to get a stronger understanding of our primary users, their background, pain points, and wants/needs
• Competitive Analysis: cross-compared across 4 similar event management apps to identify potential features
• Information Architecture: collaborated closely with developers to create and organize needed content and navigation
• User Flows: outlined the steps a user would take to complete a task
• Usability Testing: conducted 3 rounds of usability testing to ensure prototype met client needs accurately

Tech Stack 💻

On the backend of our app, the server is built with Node.js and the relational database, which holds information such as event details, is built with Postgresql. The developers then used React to develop a responsive frontend and ChakraUI for styling.

Challenges 😖

Designers

Our designs went through multiple iterations before reaching the final high fidelity prototype. Due to scheduling conflicts and the lack of interviews with multiple primary users, finalizing needed features proved difficult. This made us realize the importance of usability testing and heuristic evaluations to justify our design decisions. In the future, we would want to address these concerns in the earlier stages of designing, so that problems don’t arise as the final prototype is being created.

Developers

One challenge that arose was that the initial database design wasn’t scalable enough to match the evolving features that needed implementation. By the time we realized changes were needed, designers had already finalized the mid-fi design of the app. Additionally, database relationships also changed, and this meant making modifications to the database that minimized modifications to existing tables, leading to the need to redefine relationships and make additional changes to the tables.

Other challenges included responsive designs, which proved difficult due to our product having both a mobile and desktop interface. Making everything seamless on a variety of devices proved challenging, but the developers were able to acquire new skills and accomplish this feat!

Handoff 🥳

After finalizing our product, we wrote a comprehensive user guide with instructions on how to use our app for each end user. As we prepare for deployment, we’re excited to see the impact our product will have on Center Stage’s events and programs!

Reflection 💜

The experience from working on this project was incredibly valuable and rewarding, and it was motivating being able to work with a team where the client would openly share their excitement about our progress and how much they were looking forward to using the end product. Interactions with our point of contact, Lin, definitely boosted team morale and kept us motivated to deliver a high quality product. A huge shoutout to everyone for being an amazing team and our nonprofit partner for their consistent enthusiasm and responsiveness throughout the project!

Team Overview 👥

Design Lead: Jessica (Jay) Sotelo

Technical Leads (2): Jessie He, Nathan Luca Pietrantonio

Designers (4): Cortney Ngo, Darian Woolley, Tiffany Jiang Yan, Winston Lee

Developers (12): Anthony Suh, Aston Chan, Brendan Lieu, Cole Thompson, Daiki Narimoto, Kaitlin Leung, Lana Ramadan, Margaret Galvez, Priska Kunaidy, Sindhuja Gorti, Yihong Yu, Zion Mateo

La Peña’s History 🌎

Over time, La Peña has evolved into more than a physical space. It is a hub for BIPOC communities across the globe. Through music, art, and education, La Peña has fostered social justice initiatives and cultural understanding, creating an inclusive environment where marginalized voices can thrive. As it continues to engage with issues of cultural resistance, social equity, and political action, La Peña remains an enduring symbol of the power of community and solidarity.

Current Problem 🧠

As we conducted research, our key findings were:

• Iterative schedules are difficult to track of, leading to error cases with double-booking venues.
• Invoice system is nonexistent, so program coordinators experience frustration with handling all their finances in a spreadsheet.
• There is a backlog of overdue payments, and manually creating invoices can be unreliable if the event schedule changed.

Primary Users

• Programs Coordinator, Executive Director, and Other Administrative Staff — handle La Peña’s external and internal calendar and organize financial logistics. Their goal is to build a source of truth for scheduling and client payment statuses.

Stakeholders

• External Client/Payer — fund events in collaboration with La Peña. Their goal is to send payments to La Peña in a timely manner.
• Local Artists — host programs, classes, and workshops. Their goal is to communicate event details and maintain a reliable timeline.
• Community Members — attend program events. Their goal is to cultivate connections by participating in recurring activities.

Our Solution 🧑‍💻

To improve La Peña’s workflow, Commit the Change created a customizable administrative portal with the following features:

Event Scheduling System

Administrators can create recurring programs and one-time sessions and edit them anytime in the platform. Each program and session stores contact information about the client paying for the event, lead artists, and location data. This alleviates cognitive load and streamlines the scheduling process.

Google Calendar Synchronization

Every program automatically syncs with the administrative Google Calendar, allowing collective communication with staff and external members. All parties will have the same date and time reflected on the shared calendar.

Automated Invoices

Each program will automatically generate a monthly invoice to send to the client and lead artists associated with the event. This will significantly reduce labor costs, time, and allow for staff to focus on higher-priority tasks.

The product’s data is synced across different sections. For instance, when updates are made to a program (such as changing dates or locations) those changes are automatically reflected in the financial system. This integration reduces the risk of human error and ensures that financial documents are reliable.

Payment Notifications

Payment notifications alert admins about upcoming and overdue payments, showing exactly how late a payment is. This allows the team to act quickly and avoid miscommunications.

Features 💻

1. Schedule & View Programs

Users can easily access current, upcoming, and archived programs. New programs are created with key details like lead artists, payers, and contact emails — ensuring all relevant information is captured from the start. Each program summary also includes stored data on existing sessions and other important notes, providing a clear, organized overview that helps staff stay updated with the latest information.

2. Edit & Add Sessions

Admins can update session details based on existing program data, with editable fields like time, dates, and room location. This functionality supports editing current sessions, adding new sessions, and customization with recurring or one-time events.

3. Payment Notifications

The notifications feature alerts staff about overdue payments and unsent invoices, helping them manage financial tasks more efficiently. The system can flag cases where both actions remain incomplete, making high-priority issues easy to identify and address. These notifications are automatically generated and will be removed once the invoice is sent or payment is fully completed, ensuring the system stays current without extra manual effort.

4. Generate Monthly Invoices

Monthly invoices are automatically generated from program data that was previously collected. Admins can review and manually adjust these invoices in the portal, ensuring accuracy before finalizing them.

5. Invoice PDF Emailing

Once invoice revisions are complete, users can seamlessly email the updated PDF to relevant clients and lead artists. Automatically generated message templates and pre-filled email addresses streamline communication, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistency.

6. Settings

Admin can update new room location fees, sync the platform’s schedule to their Google Calendar, and accept other staff members to log into the system through account requests. This onboarding process allows for multiple users to gain edit access. As a result, the responsibility of event scheduling and finances can be divided amongst multiple staff members, alleviating stress on the current programs coordinator.

Tech Stack ⚙️

The server is built with Node.js, enabling JavaScript to be used on the backend. We use Express as a lightweight framework to define API endpoints for sending and retrieving data efficiently. PostgreSQL serves as our relational database for storing event, booking, and invoice information.

On the frontend, we use React to develop a responsive desktop user interface. The Chakra UI component library streamlines collaboration between designers and developers, ensuring design consistency and fast prototyping. Together, these technologies form a robust and flexible system that powers the platform’s functionality.

Development Process 💭

• Biweekly Sprints — included 1st round of coding. Sent back to technical leads to request fixes before the next sprint meeting.
• Pair Programming — fosters strong communication and collaboration.
• Database Model — contains all necessary information within the system. As the project evolved, minor adjustments were made based on client feedback. For example, the emailing feature was added as a new table within the database.

Challenges

One of the hurdles was integrating new data into existing tables. To address this, the team made strategic use of new tables to keep the system organized and reduce complications within existing structures.

There were some differences in terminology between the design and development teams as well. For example, an invoice edit to a room’s hourly fee was referred to as a “comment” in the database. To resolve this, the team prioritized clear communication and routinely All-Hands meetings to catch miscommunications early and keep the teams aligned.

Design Process 🎨

• Information Architecture — collaborated with primary users to ideate the blueprint of how each feature interacts with each other.
• Competitive Analysis — identified opportunities and pain points of 4 scheduling and financial products (Microsoft Teams, EventBrite, EventLeaf, and WildApricot).
• Journey Maps — created visual of the entire user experience. Including emotions, points of frustration, thoughts, and ways to improve their current workflow.
• User Flows — mapped step-by-step paths of how the user completes each action.
• Low-High Fidelity — walked through sketches to a high-fidelity prototype.
• 4 Rounds of User Testing — scheduled meetings with primary users. 2 rounds for mid-fidelity and an additional 2 rounds for high-fidelity.

Challenges

The team faced delays as they received invoice and project materials later than anticipated, but was resolved through client communication and structured deadlines. Maintaining consistent design across both invoice and program pages proved difficult, as did managing the design system with auto-layout features. This was resolved through virtual design work sessions and teamwork within sprint pairings.

Impact 💎

La Peña will be able to increase its capacity to schedule a higher volume of programs — opening the door to more marketing efforts and funding opportunities that directly support the Latinx community. Streamlining finances through the portal also helps the organization better manage its budget, which has already supported the recent hiring of a marketing associate. The center will benefit from a higher estimated cost of labor saved per hour, allowing staff to focus on more mission-driven work.

This collaboration with La Peña sets a new precedent for how tech can support grassroots movements and cultural preservation. View Commit the Change previous projects and work at: https://ctc-uci.com/

We are excited to continue combining tech innovation with community power and action, to create an even greater impact moving forward.

Key Takeaways 🔑

• Partnership with La Peña — worked closely with the nonprofit organization’s Executive Director: Consuelo Tupper and Programs Coordinator: Rocío Cancel. This partnership allowed for continuous feedback, leading to successful usability testing and thorough quality assurance of the final product.
• Designing and Developing Within Real-World Constraints: The Commit the Change team gained valuable experience in navigating technical and design limitations specific to the needs of a nonprofit cultural center. This involved a deep dive in learning of invoice calculations and event scheduling. Despite these constraints, the team was successful in addressing use cases, ensuring the final solution was inclusive, functional, and aligned with the organization’s mission.

This article was written by Commit The Change, La Peña team members Cortney Ngo and Jessica (Jay) Sotelo. If you have any questions or would like clarification, please email cortnen@uci.edu or jessica.sotelo253@gmail.com.

For over 25 years, Colette’s Children’s Home has been a beacon of hope for single women and children facing hardships such as homelessness, domestic violence, financial challenges, health concerns, and substance abuse. Committed to providing safety and stability, the organization offers a range of vital programs, including emergency shelters, transitional housing, employment assistance, financial literacy support, and relapse prevention. To date, Colette’s Children’s Home has empowered more than 6,000 women and children in Orange County, CA, to regain independence and achieve self-sufficiency.

As part of Commit the Change, a student led organization at UC Irvine that creates software for local nonprofits, our team developed a client and donation management portal for administrators and redesigned information forms to enhance the experience for their clients.

Team:

Design Lead: Michelle Pak

Technical Leads (2): Benson Manzano, Sean Kelman

Designers (4): Jerry Nguyen, Jolene Chou, Leilani Bascos, Vy Vu

Developers (14): Aditya Vemuri, Alex Yin, Arnav Kanekar, Colin Kwon, Dommenick Lacuata, Isaac Nguyen, Kainoa Nishida, Lindsay Lim, Maithy Lee, Matthew Chang, Mehek Bhatnagar, Nathan Che, Nathan Nguyen, Showmen Talukder

Ideation with Clients & Project Planning

First, we met with CCH representatives through various meetings to learn about their nonprofit’s mission, discuss initial problems that they faced in their everyday workflow, and their goals for our collaboration. We agreed on a rough outline of our project given our team’s constraints, and were ready to begin planning in detail.

To further refine our project idea, we created three key documents that facilitated communication between designers, developers, and clients:

1. Requirements Document — A comprehensive guide outlining design and tech stacks, constraints, scope, and acceptance criteria. We also created a Needs, Wants, and Nice-to-Haves chart to prioritize features effectively.

2. Database Model — A visual representation of how data would be structured and utilized, providing a clear foundation for development.

3. Information Architecture — A structured layout that organized content logically, ensuring ease of navigation and understanding.

After presenting these documents to CCH and receiving their approval, we were ready to begin the project. These documents served as essential references throughout the project, keeping our team aligned and on track.

The Challenge 🤔

How might we create a more efficient, user-friendly, and secure system for collecting and managing client forms and donation tracking to reduce errors, improve accessibility, and enhance data security?

What problems do CCH face in their everyday workflow?

The design team delved more deeply into the initial problems laid out by CCH, gaining further insight to their current process and users. We identified three main application users:

1. Admins — highest authority and permissions. Their main goal is to oversee all statistics.
2. Case Managers (CM) — only manage a group of clients. Their main goal is to report client and donation information to Admins.
3. Clients — women enrolled in CCH’s programs or housing. Their main goal is to complete intake and exit forms relating to the program.

To better understand and empathize with our users, we used a variety of research methods — user personas, journey maps, and comparative audits. We were able to pinpoint pain points in their current processes and brainstorm opportunities for improvement.

From our research, we gathered three key findings that would guide our design decisions.

1. Client forms and donation tracking are initially filled out on paper and later manually entered into multiple spreadsheets, increasing the risk of user errors such as inaccuracies and duplicate data.

• Handwriting can be illegible.
• Sorting through various records is time-consuming.
• Physical forms are at risk of being lost or misplaced.

2. Clients are often in distress before enrolling in CCH programs and housing, leading to a stressful and unfriendly experience when completing physical forms.

• Clients’ physical forms are lengthy, spanning 3 to 8 pages, which can further contribute to their mental burden.

3. CCH’s online files are currently accessible through a single shared login credential with minimal security measures, increasing the risk of unauthorized access.

• Administrators are concerned about data security and the need to protect sensitive client information to ensure a safe and trustworthy system.
• Clients may feel uneasy when providing personal details if they don’t feel trust in the security of their data.

The Solution 💡

Our solution consists of three parts:

Admin Portal (Web)

Securely protected by two-factor authentication, this portal will provide a centralized hub for overseeing key statistics — including client, donation, volunteer, and front desk data. Admins will be able to efficiently add, edit, and query information, significantly reducing task time and enhancing usability.

Case Manager Portal (Web)

Also protected by two-factor authentication, this portal will allow Case Managers to digitize client and other information tracking reports, reducing paperwork and eliminating the need for manual data entry across multiple spreadsheets.

Client Forms Portal (iPad)

This portal will enable clients to complete forms onsite using iPads. With a human-centered design and improved navigation, these redesigned forms will minimize paperwork and alleviate user anxiety.

The Design Process

The Development Process

Final Product Details

In our iterative process, we prioritized implementing feedback gathered from testing sessions, ensuring that our designs evolved to meet all user needs effectively. Utilizing the design system, we meticulously checked for consistency across all components and interfaces, maintaining alignment with established standards and brand guidelines.

Admin Tracking

Secured with two-factor authentication, the Admin Portal offers a secure and intuitive interface for managing client data. Key spreadsheets are presented with built-in tools for quick sorting, filtering, and querying, enabling administrators to efficiently locate and manage records. With the ability to easily search for clients and export information, the table system was thoughtfully designed for clarity, ease of use, and long-term scalability as data volume grows.

Case Manager Reporting

Secured with two-factor authentication, the Case Manager Portal provides a safe and streamlined environment for managing client information. A centralized Form Hub enables case managers to efficiently access, complete, and submit a variety of reporting forms, reducing administrative friction while maintaining data integrity and client confidentiality.

Client Forms

We transformed the previously paper-based client forms into a thoughtfully designed digital version, prioritizing compassion, simplicity, and readability. Our goal was to ease the process for CCH’s clients, regardless of the challenges they may be experiencing.

Next Steps: Project Handoff!

As we deliver the final product to CCH, our focus shifts to ensuring a smooth handoff and supporting their onboarding process. We’ve provided documentation and walkthroughs to guide future use, and we remain open to feedback as the platform is implemented. Looking ahead, we’re excited to see the impact of our product on CCH’s programs!

Reflection

Community Impact and Broader Significance: This project deepened our understanding of the real challenges faced by nonprofits and their clients. By learning about the challenges single mothers and children face, we were better equipped to design solutions that address real community needs. Our work aimed to go beyond technical functionality — to create tools that support meaningful, lasting impact for those who need it most.

Collaboration with CCH: Staying in constant communication with CCH was essential to ensuring our project met both their goals and the needs of the communities they support. Through regular conversations about user flows and platform design, we were able to make thoughtful improvements that boosted usability and relevance. Establishing clear expectations early on helped align our efforts and maintain a shared understanding of the project’s scope and potential.

Thank you CCH, for the opportunity to support your mission and help impact the lives of countless mothers and children in Orange County!

This year, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with three incredible nonprofit organizations that are making a significant difference in our community. From empowering and celebrating cultural traditions to providing support for women and children, these organizations are dedicated to addressing pressing social issues and creating positive change. Learn more about our nonprofit partners and our projects.

La Peña

About the NPO

La Peña Cultural Center is a nonprofit organization and central site for Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous diasporic communities in the Bay Area. Founded in 1975, they have been working to preserve and celebrate cultural traditions, present new interdisciplinary creative works, and nurture grassroots social justice movements with artists, activists, and allies. They present a broad range of events throughout the year, from open mics and community dance parties (Baila) to services geared towards artists and families like special projects or music and dance workshops.

About the Project

Through this school year, Commit the Change will design and implement a web application that will streamline the invoice process, automate room bookings, and improve overall organizational efficiency. This will allow La Peña to handle more bookings, reduce administrative burden, easily handle any extenuating circumstances that arise, and focus on their core mission of promoting cultural diversity and social justice. This new software will cut down hours of manual labor a week and reduce human error in booking and invoice calculation procedures. Externally, La Peña will be able to handle more bookings at the same time, increasing their outreach goals and encouraging class retention due to a highly organized payment system for workshop hosts (artists).

Meet the Team

The project leads (Jay Sotelo, Jessie He, and Nathan Pietrantonio) took on this project because they resonated with the cultural values and emphasis on preserving traditions within Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous groups.

Jessie: For me, I felt a strong connection with La Peña because of my Caribbean roots and my multicultural background. Preserving traditions and culture is very important to me because for a long time, I felt detached and out of place in both my Chinese culture and my Hispanic heritage. Recently, I’ve been able to reconnect with both my cultures and working with La Peña really helps emphasize that. I’m excited to work on a project that creates positive change while embracing the cultural aspect of the organization as well. I hope that developers working with LPA can gain a sense of community and learn about the cultural part of La Peña as well!

Jay: La Peña’s mission left a lasting impression on me due to my cultural upbringing. As someone who is both Mexican and Vietnamese, I didn’t have many opportunities to explore Mexican culture growing up. People with mixed heritage understand the complex experience of being multiple ethnicities or races, so I want to support an organization that promotes cultural inclusivity and acceptance! A life motto of mine is that it’s never too late to learn something new, so I’m excited to engage in my identity by supporting La Peña’s administration, initiatives, and audience. As we work with our team of designers and developers, I’m so excited for them to see the passion, kindness, and encouragement that us leads hold for this organization and project!

Nate: After meeting with the La Peña team, I instantly recognized the importance of the work that they do, and how our project will improve their quality of life. Having worked at a non-profit myself teaching science and technology for over 2 years, I often see the positive impact that these organizations can have. I deeply value expanding access to art, education, and community in places where it was missing, and the work CTC is doing for La Peña will help them do that better than ever. Having joined CTC to make a difference through technology, I look forward to helping such an inspiring organization build the resources it needs to grow.

“We can’t wait to onboard the rest of our members, and we’re looking forward to building advanced tech for social good!” — Jay, Jessie, Nathan

Colette’s Children’s Home

About the NPO

For over 25 years, Colette’s Children’s Home has provided compassionate support and services for single women and children who are suffering from issues like homelessness, domestic violence, economic hardship, health issues, and/or substance abuse. Striving to keep women and their children safe and nurtured, Colette’s Children’s Home offers many programs and resources including but not limited to emergency shelters, transitional housing, assistance with employment, budgeting/saving, and relapse prevention, which has assisted more than 6,000 women and children experiencing homelessness or economic hardships.

About the Project

Currently, Colette’s Children’s Home struggles with managing their client and donation/volunteer paper forms and searching for specific data on spreadsheets as it is done by hand, which is subject to user error and is time-consuming. Eliminating the potential for human error and enhancing their operations, our project will streamline client and donation/volunteer tracking with digitized intake and exit forms which will be stored and transferred to a centralized hub. The database will store and filter client data and donation/volunteer tracking, which administrators can access to add, edit, or query data through a dashboard. With a more efficient system, Colette’s Children’s Home will cut down hours that would have been spent searching through numerous spreadsheets and recording data into spreadsheets, allowing them to focus their energies on their empowering mission.

Meet the Team

Michelle: I strongly resonate with CCH’s mission and feel inspired by their contagious energy and passion! From a design perspective, I’m super excited to create forms for CCH’s clients that are both intuitive and compassionate, while also streamlining the workflow for the CCH’s admins with a newly designed dashboard! Our leads are very close-knit! We’ve worked together previously for CTC, which was a success. We’re all committed to CTC and recreating the fun, memorable experience that brought us back. You can expect both grind time and socials — you’ll definitely feel a sense of community with us.

Sean: For me, Colette’s Children’s Home’s mission spoke to me the most as they heal homelessness for women and single mothers and their children. They provide emergency shelter, a safe environment, and resources to help women and their children become self-sufficient. Our team emphasizes having a social environment where everyone can feel welcome and have a lot of fun! Some social ideas we have are going to Tacos Los Cholos/eating food, playing pickleball, going to the beach, and maybe visiting Irvine Spectrum. We also want to be active in CTC intramurals! While our priority is to finish our project, we want to have fun!

Benson: Homelessness is an issue that no one should go through. In the Philippines, my home country, many people face this and barely have enough to make a living. My parents went through poverty when they were younger so it’s a soft spot for me. Having the chance to support those in need who were given an unfair hand in the socio-economic system of our country, especially women and their children, deserve and have the right to a safe home and support to become self-sufficient. All of us were on the same team last year, so our dynamic is definitely something that I don’t think the other teams have because we already had that year of getting together and getting close, making it much easier for our team members to get close! Also, all the tech leads are 2nd years, so definitely 2nd year rep!

“We are excited to meet and work with our team, and we look forward to seeing smiles on their faces after our project has been delivered!” — Michelle, Sean, Benson

Center Stage

About the NPO

Founded in 2024, Center Stage LA is a newly established subsidiary non-profit organization of Center Stage Productions. Center Stage LA features a professional dance troupe that is dedicated to showcasing Chinese culture through high-quality performances. Their mission is to increase the visibility of Chinese performing arts through the creation of an inclusive environment where youth (often ages 5–18) can engage in publicizing Chinese culture. They offer a combination of personalized dance programs and performance opportunities for students to engage in Chinese culture while also competing for awards and accomplishments that they can use to enhance their resumes. We’re very excited to get to work with them as they launch this unique program!

About the Project

Center Stage’s current problem is the method in which they keep track of RSVPs and attendance for classes/events. As of right now, they utilize WeChat (a popular messaging platform) and must manually count messages from students to tally up attendance totals. This requires a lot of time and manpower, and our project aims to alleviate this issue by developing a centralized portal that will act not only as a RSVP/attendance tracker (which will be used to obtain attendance statistics and save the organization hours manual recording and calculating), but also streamline the process of signing up for courses on the student side and the process of offering classes/events on the admin side! Our web application will also allow teachers to track the performance of each individual student and offer classes according to skill level, allowing Center Stage to better serve their students by tailoring their instructions/feedback to each student while also increasing feelings of accomplishment when students succeed in a class that challenges them appropriately!

About the Team

Center Stage’s project team has highly capable leads that are sincerely looking forward to working with their future developers and designers! They’re also eagerly awaiting their super fun socials in the near future, biweekly sprint meetings (snacks included), and answering any and all questions 24/7.

Ethan Ho, one of Center Stage’s project leads, believes that Center Stage’s project will help grow technical skills and is super interesting — both in terms of database complexity, and the UI/UX of the completed project. He also chose this nonprofit because he worked with an academics-focused organization during his time in CTC last year and wants to broaden his horizons! Working with a culturally focused organization seemed like the best way for him to do so.

Jasmine Wu, our design lead, is a well-accomplished product designer who has won 15 hackathons and currently designs AR interfaces for spaceflight missions at NASA, among many other things. She chose Center Stage because of their mission to bring cultural nuance into dancing. As a previous ballet dancer for 8 years, she finds it refreshing to see an organization led by professional, accomplished individuals who genuinely want to deliver an experience for both students and the audience outside of purely instilling skills. She is beyond excited to move this vision forward with a platform that can offload the time-intensive work so they can focus on what they do best: teaching. Rest-assured that there’s a lot to learn from Jasmine, and she’s ready to support her designers along the journey of this project!

Steven Zhou, another one of Center Stage’s project leads, is the co-founder of ZotNFound.com (which he helped develop during a hackathon at UCI) and currently working as a software engineer intern. He has a lot of experience under his belt, and is super excited to ensure that our finished product is efficient and of the highest quality! He’s always wanted to learn more about the project management side of things, and being able to become a mentor for newer developers is why he decided to become a tech lead for Center Stage. He chose Center Stage because he finds their mission really unique and interesting. He likes the fact that this NPO is newer and just starting off, so the idea of being able to build something to help them with their mission from the beginning is enticing. He can’t dance, but watching people perform brings him joy! He hopes that many more people are able to get this same feeling while learning more about new cultures.

They hope to build a positive culture within their project team where nobody is afraid to ask questions, everyone is able to learn/try new things outside of their comfort zone, and meaningful friendships are formed!

As week 0 draws closer, Commit the Change is gearing up for a successful school year. Our dedicated executive board is working diligently behind the scenes to ensure a smooth start when school starts back up. Learn more about the team driving our mission forward.

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Kaylee Doliente

Hello there! My name is Kaylee Doliente, and I’m a rising third-year Informatics (HCI) major from San Diego. I’ve been a part of CTC since my second year when I first joined as a designer. I joined CTC during my second year because I wanted to join a community with the same mindset as me, and I also wanted the opportunity to create tangible projects for non-profit organizations. At the time, I had worked on small-scale projects, but I was eager to dive into more in-depth, year-long projects that would allow me to learn even more than before.

When I joined CTC, I was met with an extremely inviting community where everyone was eager to learn and help each other grow. It’s with CTC that I met some of my closest friends and made the funniest memories — whether it was bonding over Cholo’s Tacos runs, the W volleyball season, or going on late-night hikes. I never could have expected to be as tight-knit to my team, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. This closeness and the incredible sense of community we built fueled my passion to become President. I wanted to give back to CTC and make sure that others could have the same awesome experience that I had.

My experience with CTC has definitely helped me professionally. Interviewers are impressed with how I’ve been able to be a part of a cross-functional team, and that I’ve been able to work directly with stakeholders. Specifically as a designer, I’ve been able to gain experience in the end-to-end design process, as well as working within a group and individually. CTC pretty much gave me all the tools I needed to succeed in the professional world, whether it be hard skills such as wireframing, or soft skills like communication. I thought I had known a lot about design through my previous side projects, but CTC really made my portfolio, as well as my skills, more concrete.

I also of course had the incredible opportunity to learn from my seasoned lead and collaborate with the chillest team of designers. This was also the first time I was able to see my designs turned into code and used in real-world applications, which was extremely fulfilling. One of the highlights of my experience was seeing the smiles on our NPO partners’ faces when we presented our designs to them, which is a moment I’ll remember for the rest of my career.

Being a part of Commit the Change has been the most rewarding experience, and I’m so grateful to continue contributing to this amazing community as President!

Gayathri Yedavilli

Hi! My name is Gayathri, and I’m a rising third-year majoring in Computer Science and Business Information Management. Coming from the Bay Area to Irvine as an undeclared first-year, I initially felt lost amidst everything at UCI. However, joining CTC was one of the best decisions I’ve made during my time here.

I started in CTC as a designer, expecting to gain new skills and professional experiences. What I didn’t anticipate was forming some of my closest friendships through the club. The people I’ve met have not only supported me socially but have also consistently pushed me to excel academically and professionally. From tackling sprint tasks and enjoying hikes to sharing meals, my experience with CTC has been incredibly rewarding.

I’ve also had the privilege of learning from my project leads, gaining valuable tips for applying to internships, and building lifelong friendships. Over the years, I’ve held various positions within CTC, including designer, developer, Marketing Director, and now Internal Vice President. Each role has taught me so much, and I’ve seen significant growth in both my soft and technical skills.

I never miss an opportunity to discuss my experiences at CTC in interviews, as they’ve been instrumental in shaping my career. The skills I’ve developed — working in an Agile environment, technical proficiency, and effective cross-functional communication — have been invaluable, even in my internships.

But honestly, beyond the skills and accomplishments, it’s the unforgettable moments — like sprint meetings that turn into karaoke nights and impromptu boba runs — that make CTC truly special. Here’s to more memories, growth, and, of course, all the experiences that make every project worth it!

Emmy Chen

Hi! I’m Emmy and I’m a 3rd year Computer Science student at UC Irvine. I joined Commit the Change as a freshman, not knowing a thing about web development and eager to learn anything and everything. My first year with CTC was challenging and discouraging at times, as I navigated the difficulty of learning the new languages thrown at me while barely knowing how to code. However, with the patience and support of my teammates, I was able to finish each task smoothly until eventually I found myself relying less and less on their mentorship. I became more and more confident in my abilities to adapt, learn, and apply my new-found knowledge.

I hold CTC very close to my heart because of our dedication to upholding our core values — especially community. The bond we form with our teams is unlike any other — as we learn about our projects and struggle through the design and development process, all while learning more about each other, recording funny quotes, and celebrating each other’s successes. I found myself wanting to do more for this community that became so precious to me, motivating me to take on the role of Outreach Director last year, and now External Vice President!

CTC is a great place to find like-minded and ambitious students who will challenge and support you. I know I’ve found close friends here that I’ll cherish for the rest of my college career and longer. They’ve pushed me to reach further and higher than I ever would’ve on my own. At almost every interview or networking event, I find myself being asked about my experience at CTC. It’s truly such a rewarding experience that has helped me grow both personally and professionally.

Thank you Commit the Change! I’m excited to serve as your External Vice President for the 2024–25 school year!

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Commit the Change is a UCI student organization dedicated to delivering high-quality software solutions to nonprofit organizations free of charge while giving students the opportunity to hone their technical and soft skills.

If you’re interested in applying, please keep an eye out for our application that opens Week 0 of Fall Quarter 2024–25.

Find out more about our projects and club on our website and Instagram!

Just as the startups of today all have Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) to guide the technical direction of their companies, Commit the Change has always had a need for reliable technical leadership to ensure the successful development of its projects. Since the club’s inception, we have always been fortunate to have talented VPs of Projects to turn to for guidance in this realm.

VP of Projects, or Vice President of Projects, is a role created in March 2020 during the club’s founding and first held by alumnus Harrison Huang, now a full-time software engineer at Microsoft. They are responsible for overseeing all technical development processes, developer teams, and technical leads (“tech leads”), ensuring that proper technical oversight is maintained throughout the school year and that the club’s annual projects are successfully completed and safely delivered to the club’s partner nonprofit organizations.

Finding someone to fill such an important role was surprisingly easy at first.

Huang, coming off an internship with ASE Technical Systems the previous summer, felt confident in his technical abilities and had an immediate affinity for the role.

“I think it just naturally happened,” he said.

He settled into the role at the club’s inception, with his passion for tech definitely playing a factor. “Everyone was good at coding, you know,” he said, referencing the original group of five founders, who had all completed software engineering internships and an imposing slate of upper-division computer science courses.

“But when it came to tech and figuring out what to do next, it was mostly Albert and I who really drove things — like, ‘oh, this would be cool to try,’ and we would test proofs-of-concept and prototypes. I’d be on my computer, and he’d stand behind me watching and seeing if things worked out.”

“So it was really our natural interest to try new things. The tech side was how I did it,” Huang said.

“And then, when the club became official, we had to divide up some roles. So we said, ‘Albert’s definitely president.’ That makes sense, he spearheaded the club’s formation.”

“But everyone also agreed that we needed someone to really guide the principles of tech, you know, the project side of things, to make sure the projects are secure, locked down, and working.”

“Because without that, the club doesn’t do much. We’d just be a group of people hanging out together,” he laughed.

“A core part of our club is to actually deliver something, so we needed someone there to lock it down. We all agreed on that. There was a Google Doc — we were literally on a Google Doc in the meeting — and we had these five roles, and everyone had to nominate someone for each role. And everyone unanimously agreed that I should be the future VP of Projects.”

And as the inaugural VP of Projects, Harrison truly had no idea what to do. “I didn’t. I really didn’t,” he affirms. “Up to that point we’d only built hacky stuff for hackathons [24-hour coding competitions], you know, minimal, barely-functioning backend code that was just enough to get to the demos.”

“At that point, I told myself that we could continue down that path building hacky things, or we could actually take a look and invest and try to find good solutions.”

As they began to work on their first project, Crime Survivors, the team realized they had much to learn.

“Crime Survivors was a perfect example of how we didn’t know what we were doing,” Huang remembers. “Because we rewrote the entire codebase three times,” he said, before bursting into laughter.

“So that was a good example of why the VP of Projects has to decide these things, to define a good system and good tooling.”

“And it took me three tries for that project. Third time really is a charm.”

“It was really just trial and error,” he admits. “I liked our willingness, as a group, to invest in the fact that we could just try again.”

“Given that Crime Survivors was a test for our club, to see if it was viable, we had to nail it down, to restart as many times as we could, and we did, and we learned a lot from that.”

“For example, we learned that not everything fits well. You can’t just shove technologies into your project.”

Equipped with lessons from their collective failures, Harrison was sure of one thing — what he envisioned the VP of Projects doing, from the power they wielded to the responsibilities they possessed.

“I saw the role as more of a consulting role. I did not want to manage every project; that’s not my job. I wanted to be more of a consultant to the team leads, so they could have someone with technical knowledge to answer really interesting questions.”

“For example, if [Former Tech Lead] Albert had a problem with one of his projects, he could come to me and ask, ‘Hey, what do you think is a better solution for this? we’re running into X, Y, Z, and I’ve tried solution A, can you think of solutions B, C, or D?’”

“So that’s the role I was thinking of. The VP of Projects would help consult, offer guidance, or provide a second hand for project leads, to help them out and really solve interesting questions and problems that they might have, and provide support for them, because leading a project is not easy, I can tell from Crime Survivors.”

“The VP of Projects essentially adds another pair of eyes to each project. So that’s number one, really, to support the project leads, to make sure, if they have a problem, that they have the assistance or guidance they need.”

“So if they’re figuring out what to do, they can come and ask me, right, and make sure we can figure it out together. Because there’s no one above that.

The VP of Projects is at the top in terms of technical ‘how-should-we-proceed.’ You’re the final man to make the decisions there.”

Huang continues, mentioning that many of his decisions had far-reaching consequences.

“Not every technical decision is at a project level, some are at the organization level,” he says.

“So as a VP of Projects, you have to figure that out. For example, we decided to use GitLab [a version control and collaboration software] when we first started, because of the technical limitations of GitHub; GitHub didn’t do private repositories for 10 or more people. That was a limit they removed eventually, but I had to make the call: ‘hey, let’s use GitLab everyone, let’s figure it out.’

And this is club-wide, so once I make this decision, every project will be on GitLab. Those infrastructure problems fall to me.”

“There are also other small things like making sure the club succeeds in delivering the projects. I’m responsible for making sure things follow through there.”

“It’s up to both the VP of Projects and the project leads to drive that process; if one person’s slacking, the other person will push and make sure everyone’s aligned.”

I remember watching Harrison performing his duties that first year, jumping from team to team, reviewing every new line of code, fixing and refactoring entire codebases, firing off dozens of Slack messages each hour, checking in with tech leads, and resolving seemingly unfixable issues — all while staying out of the spotlight.

It was the role he had envisioned, and each action he took would become a part of his legacy.

“My unofficial title was ‘problem hunter,’ to just find problems in our projects, get them acknowledged by the tech leads, and fix them — sometimes by myself,” he says.

“I think I was just finding the nuanced problems that no one really — that no one was directly responsible for,” he adds. “So I filled in the gap in that sense. And it’s not just code, it’s also UI design, it’s also the processes we use, just the most random things, to just move faster and get the codebase up to a better state and a better quality, and also improve the club as a whole.”

“For Waymakers, [a previous project], there was a whole ordeal — a bunch of developers had rebuilt the same component from scratch in a dozen different ways, a very inefficient coding practice — and the tech leads were always complaining to me about it.”

Huang thought, “Wow, we should not do that.”

“I was like, ‘all right, we need to buckle down and ensure the designer to developer experience works,” he said.

Rather than calling dozens of meetings and discussing the issue until a solution was reached, Harrison did things the only way he knew how: firing some pre-emptive Slack messages, stretching his fingers, opening his laptop, and fixing the code himself. Within a few weeks, a template component, a foundational piece that could be built upon and reused as needed, was created and ready to use in production. The announcement was simple, nothing more than a casual mention in a weekly developer meeting.

The developer team was completely unaware that Huang’s desperate, back-breaking act of labor had helped resolve a massive inefficiency and countless problems in the future.

“I try to stay behind the scenes,” Huang says.

This go-getter, do-it-yourself attitude, a hallmark of Huang’s leadership style, mostly stemmed from a memorably mediocre internship experience.

“I think what I pulled from my experience is that not all the good ideas are going to come from the higher-ups. You have to derive them yourself — you see a problem and you solve it.”

“My past experiences involved working on a lot of projects where I was responsible for getting things done.”

“At my first internship I was the only developer in charge of creating a user interface for a medical machine. I was the only one, and my ‘boss,’ I guess, just gave suggestions on what would be cool to implement.”

“Like, ‘Oh, can you add a camera in here, and also make the views swivel — that’ll be a nice touch.’ ”

Sidelined, Huang begrudgingly accepted the pointless tasks he was assigned.

“At the end of the day, it was my responsibility to make sure that the user interface was usable.”

“It was really interesting because there was no mouse, no keyboard, everything was touchscreen, so that changes the whole UI landscape. Make sure the buttons are massive, make sure everything’s clickable. At some point, I had to add an onscreen keyboard.”

“I only did that because it felt right, so I think what I can pull from that is that there are decisions that need to be made that just come from intuition, like you have to just go for it and do it.”

“And that carried over to the VP of Projects role, where I knew no one above me was going to solve my problems, so I had to solve them myself. If I see something, I can’t ask my boss or my manager, ‘Hey, what do you think?’ There’s no one to ask. So on the technical side, it was ultimately left up to me to figure out solutions to the issues we had.”

“It really came from my past experiences of owning projects and having ownership of whatever I was working on, I think that helped — that mindset of how there’s no one else, so you have to figure it out yourself.”

It’s amazing how well those experiences transferred over to the VP of Projects role, Huang’s first time taking on a technical leadership position.

“I had never led anything technical on a bigger scale like this,” he says, referencing that first year. “I think that year was one of the more fun experiments, my first time being a lead, not just having myself to do things, but working as a group.”

That was on a whole different level, you know, because you can’t expect everyone to work on the same level as you. They all have their own lives, you can’t force them to do things. Like I would be totally willing to spend a Saturday coding, but working on a team doesn’t mean there are duplicates of you.”

“That’s in another world — maybe the metaverse, I don’t know.”

Though Huang managed to resolve most of the issues, some solutions evaded him. In a sense, there was simply too much for an individual to handle.

The end-of-year project handoff process, for one — the club’s transferring of its projects over to its partner nonprofits — presented numerous difficulties.

And as the wearer of dozens of hats, the club’s technical all-seeing eye, Huang knew it was coming.

“When I first took the role, I knew it was going to be a disaster at the very end of the year. Just because of the nature of things. And I knew the first two quarters would be the easiest and most smooth-sailing experience, because there’s no pressure with deadlines, you know, we still have another quarter to finish things, we’re still far away from the completion date. And I knew that if we didn’t push earlier, we would be a disaster in the end.”

As the end of the year approached, Huang got to work, mapping out timelines, to-do tasks for each project’s leads, and potential blockers in the process.

“It was intense,” he said. “That was one of the things I spent a lot of time figuring out: what is a good system to get everyone aligned for the final stretch? I knew that we couldn’t ship everything. We had a lot of nice-to-haves. Like ‘oh, that would be cool,’ but it’s not feasible. A lot of conversations were had to shrink projects down to something manageable. The same conversations happened with the projects Albert led, and I had the same conversation with Rebecca and Ethan, two other tech leads, for the Justice for Families project.”

“So that was one thing that hadn’t been done — making sure we could do what we promised while being reasonable.”

And then just figuring out how much documentation we should write — no one likes writing documentation, so I suggested keeping it minimal — but at least we should have something for the nonprofits to onboard with, and if they have questions they can ask us.”

Huang sent out dozens of Slack messages, keeping everyone up-to-date on his plan, distributing action tasks for the tech leads, and reassuring the club that he had it on lock.

Toward the end, each project’s tech leads went into a frenzy, reviewing final code additions, firing off emails to their nonprofit contacts, and following Huang’s project handoff plan as closely as possible.

“Getting everything sorted out was quite difficult,” Huang said. “And I don’t think I got it down, to be honest. I don’t think I fully figured it out, or pushed everyone to reach a handoff document of the same quality.”

“That’s mostly because it was just so much effort. It was spring quarter, and everyone was dreading this moment.”

And as each project was completed and delivered to its new owners, Huang and the tech leads breathed a sigh of relief. Although its holistic success was questionable, at least the projects had exchanged hands.

Huang was pessimistic.

“Overall, I would say the handoff process was one of my pitfalls as a VP of Projects. I don’t think I fully figured it out, I don’t think I fully built a good handoff process.”

“It was a real pain point for everyone.”

That April, as the club neared the end of its first year, its board members prepared to elect the next generation of leaders. During the selection meeting, silence could be heard during the VP of Projects discussion.

“I think VP of Projects should be a two-person role,” Huang declared adamantly, throwing his support behind budding third years Zubair Sidhu and Rostam Vakhshoori.

Before leaving his post, Huang prepared a document for his successors, filled with lessons, regrets, and inspiration from his journey. Jokingly referred to by board members as his “manifesto,” the document, titled “How To: VP of Projects,” a three-month long project boasting five pages, 700 words, and dense paragraphs of hard-earned wisdom, was all Sidhu and Vakhshoori received before taking on their positions.

“You are the visionary,” page two reads.

“You are the VP of projects, you are the watchtower. There is no one higher, no one above you to tell you what’s best. You drive the initiatives that you want to see, and the long term goals are your niche. If you don’t like how something is progressing, pivot. But pivot from both ends. Make recommendations from the top, but more importantly, remember that no task is too low for you. Get your hands dirty, get your boots on the ground, and jump into the codebase with your comrades.

Passionate people make ideas great,” the next point declares.

Taking Huang’s words to heart, Vakhshoori and Sidhu kicked off the summer with ambition, passion, and ideas for a restructuring initiative the club desperately needed.

As former developers, they recognized that one of the club’s weakest points was its CI/CD pipeline, the continuous integration and continuous deployment process that allows newly written code to be integrated into the existing codebase and put up on the internet for all to view. Done right, it can be a seamless process that handles code formatting, code reviewing, bug fixing, and all aspects of the deployment process.

Over the summer, Sidhu and Vakhshoori whipped up a detailed slide deck with a list of ideas, presented their ambitious CI/CD plan to the CTC board, and quickly got to work implementing it in the club’s infrastructure, adding to an ever-growing list of desired features as they worked.

Having been in action for months, the results of their work are barely perceptible to the club’s developers — a classic example of the saying “Some jobs are only noticed when done poorly.” Each time a request is made to merge in new code, the new CI/CD pipeline runs a myriad of checks: ESLint, which enforces strict code formatting rules; detect-secrets, which confirms that no passwords or credentials are leaked; and ReviewDog, which confirms that the website was deployed correctly and leaves comments on the merge request if any errors are raised. Other initiatives that are new this year: an effort to use Github Projects, a task management system built into the code review service; and a handy bot that creates an branch and associates it with a specific issue when prompted by the command “/cib,” providing a much-needed tool that is otherwise not built in to Github.

During our interview, I watched as Sidhu navigated the codebase and the pipeline like the back of his hand, firing off click after click on his mouse, scrolling and highlighting relevant portions of code like it was second nature, only pausing to wait for webpages to load. He spoke about the pipeline with a sense of incredulity, of pride, as he had every right to do.

He had taken on a tremendous responsibility, and he had delivered.

Observing Sidhu’s eagerness and genuine passion for code reminded me of a fascinating sound bite from my interview with Huang:

“When we announced the new board and it was super exciting, I had a call with Rostam and Zubair, on the side, and I said, ‘Okay, this is a big task,’” Huang recalls.

“ ‘There are a lot of things, a lot of the most arbitrary, random things, that you are now responsible to solve.’”

“‘And I’m telling you now, because I had to do those things, and they were not part of the description.’

‘It was just, ‘fix this problem, or the club will not succeed.’”

“You’re responsible for the club now,” Huang told them. “You are going to have club-wide impacts that either make or break the club.”

“ ‘You have to make those calls and it’s hard’ — and I told them here and there about all the things that went wrong for me.”

As CTC prepares to open next year’s board applications, it remains to be seen who will take on the role next, and how Rostam or Zubair will share their words of wisdom. But one thing is clear — it will be someone strong, someone talented, and someone who will leave a legacy that will resonate for years to come.

I’m entering my third school year with CTC, and I can’t recall our club ever having a typical, meme-free culture.

And that’s a little strange. On paper, we’re a club that focuses on tech for social good. We partner with nonprofits, we improve the community, we help those in need — all wholesome things.

But my earliest memories from the Waymakers project team last year involve nothing but tomfoolery: I remember being asked to tell jokes on the spot to stall for time during meetings while another developer hotfixed our code; I did pull ups live on camera, per popular request; and I remember hearing another developer’s Mickey Mouse impression live on Zoom — not just once, but over and over, enough for the cadence of that rodent’s voice to be etched permanently in my brain.

Co-VP of Design and former Waymakers Designer Vivian Chu had to agree. “I remember [Waymakers Tech Lead] Leon Lin would just make random noises on Zoom. And this one guy would do a Mickey Mouse impression during our meetings,” she said.

“And because everything was on Zoom last year, all of the chat on the side was always super troll and memey,” she added.

The developer team for Justice for Families, another project from last year, also had their share of fun. “We liked to do icebreaker questions for every single teamwide meeting we had,” Former Justice for Families Tech Lead Ethan Nguyen said. “And one day we thought of this fantastic idea to do NorCal vs. SoCal.”

“And we had great answers from both sides. I think someone said that all the hotties were in SoCal. That was a really fun one.”

And I remember the first time my face appeared on an emote in the CTC Slack workspace. I, like many sunshine-averse college students, have always had that one good picture of myself I use everywhere — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack.

It didn’t take very long for someone to strip my silhouette from that photo, upload it to Slack, and convert it to an emote — one of many custom emoji reactions available on the club workspace. Before I could say “identity theft,” there were five emotes of me: the original, a flashy, party-themed one; an emote of me shirtless, abs bared; a party-themed shirtless one; and one of me dabbing, aptly named :dabbing-mingjia:.

“Why are you such a meme?” OC Habitats Developer Andrea AhSue, who is new to the club this year, asked me in our interview.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged, chalking it up to club culture.

No matter where you look on the Slack workspace, you’ll find a wide assortment of crude humor, original memes, Twitch lingo, and members bellowing their favorite battlecry: “LET’S GOOOOO!”

But hidden behind this playful, light-hearted facade is a tremendous amount of passion, drive, talent, and a culture known for its reliability and accustomed to success.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you! I cannot thank you guys enough,” I remember Michelle Heater, Human Trafficking Victims Assistance Program Director at the Waymakers nonprofit, saying, wiping away tears after seeing the design wireframes and code demos we presented to the organization last November.

I recall the first time I saw her genuinely moved by our work, grateful that a group of busy college students willingly took time out of their schedules and used their talents for social good, offering to restructure her organization — her life’s work — and make it ridiculously easy for her to benefit the community as she always had.

By creating a digital volunteer dashboard, we’d allowed Michelle to toss out dozens of stacks of paper documents and spreadsheets, the product of hundreds of man-hours, and we had done it all out of the kindness of our hearts and a passion for software and its potential for change. And she wasn’t even seeing the whole product — all it took was some low-fidelity design wireframes, not much more than pen-and-paper sketches, and the most barebones frontend code on a browser to bring her to tears.

And in that moment, as I watched Michelle’s reaction while memories of the painstaking hours-long coding sessions, dozens of dad jokes, and Discord servers filled with cringe-worthy memes crossed my mind, I held back a grin — an expression of sheer amazement, disbelief, and gratitude.

Disbelief that such a meme-filled, fun-loving group of people could be capable of such stupidity behind the scenes and yet deliver good work when called on, and gratitude that I found myself among such talented, humorous, and dedicated people.

Michelle won’t believe what goes on in our meetings and Slack channels, I thought. And honestly, I didn’t either.

But then I realized: it made perfect sense. It had to be this way. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The dichotomy before me — of such low-brow humor, and yet such incredible work for social good — was simply a manifestation of our members’ brilliance and an omen of the success to come.

“I’d say it shows that we’re a pretty well-rounded club,” Co-VP of Design Vivian Chu said. “That we’re not just teammates but also friends, and I think being able to work with people you actually have a friendship with, or a more intimate relationship with, kind of motivates you to work harder. Because you’re both working towards a common goal, but on the side, you guys are also able to connect and have a friendship that exists.”

“It says something about the character of the people who come out to the club — people who really do care about their surroundings and their local community, but also know how to have a good time, which is the best of both worlds,” Co-President Ethan Nguyen said.

At the end of the day, we are making things for nonprofits, but might as well have fun doing it.”

Others were also in agreement.

“I would describe CTC’s culture as a “work hard, play hard” environment where everyone works really hard and is dedicated to our mission, but they also like to crack jokes and roast people,” Find Your Anchor Tech Lead Megha Kak said.

“It makes CTC like a mini internship, but without the stress and confusion. It’s just a fun environment where people are so supportive, and they want to encourage you and see you grow.”

“I’d say CTC is uplifting, welcoming, helpful, and caring,” Nguyen said.

“The big ideas are growth, support, and impact,” Kak added.

Noting CTC’s uniqueness, Kak also said, “One thing that sets CTC apart, I think, is that it provides industry experience for UCI students that we just don’t really get otherwise. Something that people do a lot is, you know, hackathons and Leetcode, all these things that are going to get them an internship. They don’t realize that joining clubs at UCI can provide them with a lot more support and resources to help them succeed in the future, and CTC specifically provides the best resources. It’s a combination of the smartest people on campus and people who are so encouraging and supportive and want to see you grow and want the club to improve.”

Internal Vice President Joshua Liu was in agreement. “We try to keep it fun and light-hearted whenever we can,” he said.

“I feel like especially as a CS student, a lot of times with coding or doing projects, there’s a feeling of stress or a highly stressful environment, you know — like coding for your projects, or grinding for school at the last minute, or when you’re Leetcoding and studying for interviews.”

“But when it comes to CTC, it’s always pretty refreshing to work on a project, while everyone who’s coding right beside you actually wants to be there.

“A lot of times, in group projects, no one wants to be there, no one wants to put in the work — but it’s really fun and exciting in CTC, when everyone is actually passionate, having fun, and learning.

“I know when I joined last year as a developer, CTC really helped reinvigorate my passion for coding, and it kind of brought back the original reason I really like the fun and the creativity of it all.”

Liu also notes that the club’s culture trickles down from the board to its general members. “Leadership is really important,” he says. “If we have a lot of energy at our meetings, then everyone else will pick up on that.”

“It’s just really important to put in the effort. If you’re available, you should be going out to every possible event that we host.”

“It’ll show that there are people who are committed to interacting with club members, having fun, and getting to know people, and that will hopefully encourage club members to pick up on that and reflect that as well.”

“So whatever type of member you ideally want in the club, you would want everyone on your board to reflect that, to lead by example.”

Whether this was the founders’ intention, though… is unclear.

“It’s not like there was a specific direction in mind for the culture, it was just that there should be one — as in, people should have shared values and goals. That’s the most important thing: shared values and goals. It didn’t matter how they were shared,” Founder and Inaugural President Albert Zhang said.

How it turned out, though… is quite clear.

“It turned out amazingly,” Zhang said. “I mean, at first there was a lot of difficulty because everyone was remote and we were still getting used to it.”

“But now I see, now that you guys are in person, you guys have a lot of shared values — shared memes, shared stickers — like the fact that you guys can produce stickers with a common meme of ‘worry frog’ [another famous custom emote on the CTC Slack].”

Kak agreed. No longer confined to small, grainy rectangles and awful mics on Zoom, she found in-person interactions much more gratifying and enjoyable. “I feel so much more comfortable and open to talking to people this year and just reaching out to hang out, you know. We had in-person socials for our Find Your Anchor team, and we definitely got to see people’s personalities shine a lot more in person than in the games we played on Zoom.”

Not only was the shift to in-person school an adjustment for club members, but even just joining CTC takes some transitioning — something that I definitely experienced last year.

As the months flew by and the lines of code in our codebase continued to multiply, and, to my dismay, the jokes only got worse, I became accustomed to CTC’s culture and workflow.

I began to participate more in the club’s crude humor, while also staying behind longer after developer meetings to grind out my code. I loved the club, I loved everything it stood for, and I loved investing myself and my time fully into everything it had to offer. I wanted the club to become the best that it could be, I wanted the joy I experienced in our meetings to seep into my personal life, and I wanted to keep committing the change in the community.

One night in March of 2020, the day before Trump officially declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency, a group of UC Irvine students gathered in Third Year Albert Zhang’s apartment.

They had gathered that evening to plant the foundations of a new club, a tech club for social good, and to discuss their first project with an organization called Crime Survivors.

The room was small but cozy. A large whiteboard stood between the kitchen and the room where the students had gathered, just opposite a Twice poster and an intricate tiger painting on the other wall. A massive couch took up most of the floor.

A few minutes past 7:00pm, Albert stood and cleared his throat. A few people trailed in just as the meeting began. “Welcome,” Albert said. “Welcome.” A girl entered and sat on the floor.

Albert paced around a bit, arms crossed, deep in thought. The slight bulge of his round, toned biceps peeked out from under the sleeves of his gray t-shirt.

“If I could get everyone’s attention, please. Welcome to our first official meeting.”

“The first order of business is that we finally decided on a name for the club,” he said. “We’re going to be called Commit the Change.”

“Is that like, a Github pun?” someone asked.

“Yeah. Not bad, right?”

The room was mostly silent. There was a cough.

Albert cleared his throat.

“And one more thing — up until this point we’ve just been messing around on a Discord server. But I think we might switch to Slack now, to make our club more legitimate.”

It’s safe to say that at that time, no one in that room knew exactly how legitimate that club — with Albert at the helm — would eventually become.

***

Albert Zhang grew up in Little Neck, New York City, a diverse neighborhood in the borough of Queens. “It had a bit of everything,” he said. “I saw various things, including impoverished families and children. There was some crime as well.”

“I think I had a lot of problems as a kid. My parents were always super busy, my dad was always in China doing business or whatever, and my mom would work until 7:30, so I was alone for a lot of the time.”

“I had friends, but for the most part, I would prefer to stay indoors and play video games because I think I had issues with confidence,” he said. “Until I met the right group of people. They helped push me to a better path.”

In high school, he started getting more involved. He joined clubs, started doing sports, and began hitting the gym. It was an era of growth for him.

In 2017, Albert found himself packing his bags and flying across the country for a new start. He had committed to UC Irvine to study computer science.

“In New York, everyone in my school typically goes out of state,” he said. “I happened to come to California because I got into UC Irvine, and I watched some videos and it seemed fun.”

He soon found out that college, and adult life, was nothing like he expected.

“I had no idea how anything worked. I thought people would just graduate and somehow you would get a job, like communism,” he said. “One day I went on Reddit, and I stumbled on r/cscareerquestions, and I realized that having a career is something that you have to actually do on your own. It’s not something you just get.”

Looking back, he has no regrets about choosing UC Irvine. “I think UCI gives you so much room to be able to take your destiny into your own hands, because there’s not a toxic culture here. There’s a supportive community and a lot of freedom compared to some other places.”

And within this supportive community, Albert thrived. His time as an Anteater has been rather eventful , and nothing short of a success. He’s forged lasting friendships, met his current girlfriend, and racked up a considerable stack of internships: working an unpaid gig at first and then a SWE role at Capital One before landing his most recent position at Microsoft two summers ago, where he’s now working full-time after graduation.

And yet, even with all the success he found, Albert felt that something was missing from the quintessential ICS student experience: a lack of opportunities for professional development. This lack drove him to rush the UC Irvine chapter of Alpha Kappa Psi, a professional business fraternity, in the spring of his sophomore year, where he served as Vice President of Professional Development and planned career-oriented info sessions, professional development seminars, and more. Although it was an improvement, the lingering feeling that the computer science department still lacked so much more eventually led him to start the club now known as Commit the Change.

“The biggest reason I wanted to start this club is because I felt that the tech community was lacking a lot. If you look at a different school like Stanford or Berkeley there are just so many different clubs dedicated to advancing students’ technical knowledge and teaching them how things work in the real world. There’s no chance in hell we hold a speaker event and Jeff Bezos comes to attend, but there is a chance he does that at Stanford,” he said.

Founder and Inaugural Internal Vice President Justine Koa was in agreement. “Albert and I would talk about it a lot when we were grinding Leetcode to try to get FAANG internships, and we were so determined, like, ‘We set out to do this, and we’re going to do it.’”

“And then, once we got our internships and we were able to do it, we were like, ‘Wow, why did we feel like we couldn’t do this?’ And we were thinking, ‘we don’t see a lot of the community here going for these internships,’ and we felt that people weren’t because they thought that they couldn’t.

“They were automatically counting themselves out or thinking, ‘Oh, because I don’t go to this Ivy league, or Berkeley, I’m never really going to work at these companies.’”

So we were really passionate about trying to help other UCI students get more confidence and build them up, and give them the assurance that they could do whatever they wanted to do if they worked at it.”

“And we thought a great way to do that would be to start a club, to start that community, to make it more known and to normalize it, so that it’s not like, ‘Oh, this random group of people is really driven, and they worked hard to get that internship, but that’s just them.’ No, it’s all of UCI — we’re all out here doing it, and we’re great, and UCI’s a great school.”

Commit the Change was going to be a legitimate club, one that focused on tech for social good, and each year they would partner with a handful of nonprofits to build software to streamline their internal processes, whether that meant replacing their old spreadsheets with a nifty online dashboard, creating a virtual volunteer-hour-tracker, or building them a website and distribution system for their educational videos and craft kits — anything that would make it easier for them to benefit the community and continue doing the work they always did.

“The concept of building tools for organizations has never existed at UC Irvine,” Albert added. “There’s so much potential within UCI because the students are definitely talented, smart, and really passionate. There just hasn’t been as much of a platform for these students to take their talent into their own hands and do things with it.”

Founder and Inaugural Treasurer Leon Lin added, “We realized that there’s no club that does anything like this at UCI. There’s ACM, WICS, ICSSC, and Hack, but no one really engages in actual development, and an experience that we felt was severely lacking at the school was industry experience. Since all of us had industry experience, we wanted a way to pass it on to people and make the students at the school more talented.”

“School really only teaches you about computer science, which makes sense, it’s the major, it’s called computer science, but what the majority of people want to do with that computer science degree is to go to the real world,” Lin said.

Armed with these modest observations, a smattering of internship experience, and empowered spirits, Albert and five of his closest friends set foot on a life-changing journey, one that, despite the challenges and chaos of the pandemic, would achieve levels of success surpassing even their craziest expectations.

***

About an hour into that first meeting, much was still uncertain. But progress was being made, and the whiteboard was running out of space.

Then-third year Harrison Huang stood just beside the whiteboard, scribbling furiously as the founders planned out the “tech stack,” or collection of software and languages, that the team would use for their first project with Crime Survivors. “React. MongoDB,” he wrote, before scribbling a quick “GraphQL?”

As everyone watched, silent, the founders laid out the foundations for the structure of the club, paving the way for future generations of members.

But even in the room that very evening, the air buzzing with excitement and anticipation, Commit the Change was nothing more than an idea — something that Founder Albert Zhang was famous for.

Describing the birth of the club, a moment from weeks earlier, Koa noted Zhang’s tendency to dream big and innovate with ambitious ideas.

“A lot of times he’ll say something, but we’ll all be like, ‘’Haha, yeah,’ and nothing really comes of it. We don’t actually do it, or we all just kind of think ‘Oh, yeah it’s just another thing Albert said as a joke.’ But that day it was more serious, where he was like, ‘It’s not a joke, I really think we can do this, and we should do this.’ And then we were all kind of hyping each other up, like ‘Oh yeah, we will do this!’ and ‘It’s okay if we fail, we’re gonna try it anyway,’ Koa said.

So then right after we all hyped each other up, I think it was probably Albert who said, ‘We should go to Yard House to celebrate.’”

“So then we just went to Yard House, ordered off the happy hour menu, and ate food — the poke nachos, and the onion tower ring — and we were so happy because we were just excited, I guess, because we decided it was a real thing now. Then we said, “Oh, we should take a photo. Like a celebratory one, I remember.”

The CTC founders. (from left: Harrison Huang, Kayla Tran, Justine Koa, Albert Zhang, Fernan Lukban) Note: Founder Leon Lin is not pictured, and neither are founding members Ethan Nguyen, Mingjia Wang, Sonali Chellappa, Kamille Suayan, Ryan Adra, or Rebecca Leung.

“Looking back now, that was a pivotal point of… just sitting together, having fun, and talking about our idea for an amazing new club,” Huang said.

But though its members were in good sprits and stuffed with food, the club had nothing to show for itself. It was still just a figment of Zhang’s imagination.

It needed a portfolio, established internal design processes, and something to show the world it was a club that was here to stay.

Recognizing this, Zhang began an ambitious cold-emailing campaign. That summer, he sent out dozens of emails to local nonprofit organizations each day, advertising the work that Commit the Change did and inquiring about any potential issues the nonprofits needed help with.

Lin recognized the need for such a process, especially due to all the planning that had to be done to get the club up and running. “So then we were cold emailing, just a lot of planning, you know, people would come over to our apartment, night after night, it was pretty often. We’d draw plans on our whiteboard, just storyboarding, you could say.”

These sessions often went late into the night, at which point everyone returned to their own homes, exhausted, but they all recognized the need for such elaborate planning to help the club succeed.

Then the founders sat back and prayed for a response. And one day, like a light in the dark, one came: Patricia Wenskunas, founder of Orange County nonprofit Crime Survivors said that she would be happy to partner with Commit the Change. For years, Crime Survivors had been distributing hundreds of paper resource pamphlets, and she’d like to digitize the process and put the pamphlets up on the internet for all to view — the perfect project for a budding organization like Commit the Change.

At this, the founders all breathed a sigh of relief, but they recognized there was much work to be done.

“When Albert first heard back from Patricia from Crime Survivors and that she was actually interested in talking, I was kind of shook because it’s one thing for us to say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do this, let’s just start emailing,’ but receiving a response made us realize, ‘Wait, it’s actually happening now,’ Koa said.

We were actually involving a company, a nonprofit, so it was serious.”

“We weren’t going to agree to do something and then not do it — that would be messed up.”

“So I remember him telling me, ‘I’m going to go meet with her, can you take me — can we go together?’

“I was so nervous because the introvert in me was like, ‘I don’t know how to talk to adults, I don’t know how to talk to this nonprofit.’”

“But we had to do it because we really wanted to secure something to get the club going, so we drove over to the office, and she was really nice, and just talking to her and hearing her problem was such an interesting experience for me because I felt I was kind of a consultant.”

“She was telling me all her issues and Albert and I were kind of trying to come up with a solution on the fly, and that whole thing was pretty nerve-wracking but also really cool after it was over.”

“She really seemed to want to work with us. I was like, ‘Wow, it’s really happening.’ It hadn’t really set in yet.”

“Other than that, when we started actually working on the project, the [GitHub repositories] were made.”

Things started to suddenly feel very real, and Commit the Change was born.

The founders began to put their internship experience to work: development for the Crime Survivors project was done in “sprints,” or two-week development phases, and all code was published to GitHub, an industry-standard version control tool, and reviewed professionally before merging it into the existing codebase. The developers also held weekly stand-ups, or progress update meetings — another industry tradition — and slowly made progress on the project, even challenging themselves to utilize technologies they’d never seen before.

The founders wanted the club to simulate an internship, so they could give its members a taste of how things were done in the industry and prepare them for the workforce.

“What helped us from our internships was the work ethic, it was the way we did things, it was the way we structured ourselves,” Lin said.

“We would work in sprints, we would use Gitlab.”

“We already knew how to use Git and how issues were tested in team compositions. So that part really helped us. What we weren’t sure about was the actual tech stack we were using. We were using things that I had never really touched before, or any of us had really touched before. We had to really research deeper about using Gatsby and Netlify and stuff like that.”

“But our internships had already prepared most of us for other things: Javascript, React, Node. We learned Graph QL on our own, and we just picked up on things we really weren’t familiar with.”

Even armed with years of experience, it wasn’t easy for the founders by any means. I pressed Leon during our interview, asking if they always knew what they were doing.

“Not really,” he said. “There were a lot of new things that we were trying — like leading our own team for a multi-month scale. It wasn’t anything like a hackathon, where we’re like, ‘Okay, you do this, you do that you do that.’ This was the first time we’d really worked on a large scale project from start to finish, and that was something that we didn’t know about.”

Curious to hear about the grind and the journey, I asked about something they struggled with.

“How to keep up our work ethic,” he said. “When you start a new project, you start strong, and then your motivation gradually declines because you’re working on the same thing for a month at a time, or you’re fixing a lot of annoying bugs because you’re using tech that you’ve never really used before.”

Things quickly got difficult for the team.

“We encountered quite a few road bumps with what we wanted to do. We had to decide, for example, what technologies we thought they should use.”

“At the start, we were using Javascript, for example, and then two months later, all of a sudden we’re switching to TypeScript.”

“And switching over cost us hours, tens of hours of development time, because we switched over to something that we heard was good, that we weren’t familiar with, so we had to catch ourselves up on learning a lot.”

“So that wasted a lot of time — that really pushed back the deadline a lot — and part of what we also did was overestimating the amount of work we had.” We thought that it was pretty simple: ‘you do this, you do that, you’re done,’ right?”

“But it wasn’t simple at all — that was a really naive way of thinking.”

And as the development process dragged on, hounded by confusing new technologies, fatigue, and demotivation, the founders felt the excitement and novelty of the new club wear off.

“We were really tired,” Lin said.

Developer and Inaugural VP of Projects Harrison Huang began to notice cracks emerging in the club, problems that he believed had to be addressed.

“Throughout most of it, I was very skeptical,” Huang said. “I was the person that thought, ‘If we don’t fix this, this club is not gonna work out.’”

“So every week, we did a kind of a weekly meeting, and I went through… every possible problem I could see, I guess.”

“ And then… slowly but surely, every worry I had was addressed.”

“From the start, there was always something new to worry about for me. In the beginning, I was like, ‘can we even finish anything we’ve committed to?’ Then it was recruitment.”

During the recruitment period Harrison is referencing, Commit the Change received over 100 applications and more than quadrupled the size of the club.

and then it was, ‘all right, what do we do with all these people?’” Huang said.

All the while, the Crime Survivors development team was still struggling. “They were having difficulty finishing the project because they stopped finding it interesting, I guess is the best way to put it,” Koa notes.

As the team grinded through bug after bug and wrangled with unfamiliar frameworks and ripped their hair out styling sites with CSS, facing some of the ugliest parts of web development, their bright, spanking-new dreams of starting a club were beginning to fade, and they hadn’t even been able to get a single project on the board.

Then they shifted gears completely, revamping the design of the project and injecting new life into their wearied hearts.

“They pushed through by revamping the design, they talked to Kamille and Sonali, two designers they’d recruited from neighboring clubs, about it, I remember, sometime over the summer, and they redesigned it, and then they had a new thing to look at and a new project, I guess, to push forward to complete,” Koa said.

Ironically, going back to their roots and stepping back to view the bigger picture also helped speed the process along.

“We would hop onto a call that was supposed to be an hour, and then we would be talking for over three hours about something, and then we would realize that we were going off topic really talking about this other thing.”

“Something we would do that would cause stress is that we would think too far into the future, and then we’d ask ourselves, ‘why do we stress ourselves out trying to put something together something that’s not even needed?’”

“Let’s focus instead on what actually makes our club unique and what we originally wanted to do, instead of trying to kind of tack things on to our club. More isn’t always better, so we were like, ‘Okay, maybe we need to scale back and refocus.’”

The founders — who were good friends long before CTC had even existed — were also able to use their close ties to their advantage, providing one last spurt of motivation to push them to the finish line.

“I would only partner with Leon because I knew exactly — because I was around him so much I knew all of his habits and methods, not just in coding but also in real life,” Huang said.

“When he doesn’t want to do it, and when he’s super into it — and that’s when you want to capitalize on that.”

“That kind of interpersonal knowledge of people is extremely helpful when you want to do things. I know how Albert is, I know how Justine is and Leon is, and I know their specific niches that they’re really good at. Justine is really good at organizing everything,” Huang said.

With Harrison serving as cheerleader, the team was able to maneuver around the rough patches and, finally, deliver the completed project to Crime Survivors.

But even with that obstacle behind them, there was still much work to be done. They needed a constitution, a board, and a larger team of members.

“The constitution was heavily inspired by ICSSC’s constitution, because I also had to work on that constitution. so It’s kind of a similar thought process there,” Koa said.

“There are so many things to starting a club that I didn’t even think about before, because even though I was in ICSSC as a board member before, there are so many things that you don’t need to think about because they’re already established. It’s just the norm, so people just do it. But when you’re starting a whole new club, you have to think about all these things that you didn’t think about before: ‘Oh, how does this work,” to ‘How does the election process work,’ or ‘how is that going to work?’”

“How are we going to recruit new members, how are we trying to brand our club, and what do we want people to think when they see us, because I remember a huge talk in the early stages was how we wanted to create a community to support people in trying to get these internships and develop professionally, but we also didn’t want to come off as snobby.”

“As things were getting started, it was still new, but we were in it enough and there was no going back, essentially. At times it felt stressful, at least for me, because I guess personally I cared a lot about everyone that we founded it with. We’re obviously friends first, so I cared a lot about how everyone else was feeling about the club.”

“And if they had high expectations, I felt scared that we weren’t going to reach everyone’s expectations and I was nervous about it, especially Albert, because I knew it was originally his idea.”

“Sometimes I felt scared that we weren’t going to meet his expectations. And even though I know he wouldn’t blame anyone or be mad, I just felt bad.”

At one point, about five months in, the founders went in a circle at a board meeting doing a “vibe check” to see how everyone was feeling. “Most people said it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. I don’t think anyone was 100%,” Koa said.

Still, they trudged on. “I think we said, ‘we’re gonna keep trying, but we also don’t feel great right now.’”

“But Albert was saying, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be great, don’t worry.’ For Albert, even if he is slightly doubting it himself, he won’t tell other people that.”

As the months flew by, it became time to delegate roles and assignments. The founders sorted themselves out. Albert would be the club’s first President. Kayla would be External Vice President. Justine would be Internal Vice President, Harrison would be VP of Projects, and Leon would be VP of Recruitment and Treasurer.

Deciding the roles made things easier for the club moving forward.

“When we made Leon VP of Recruitment, we were kind of just saying, ‘Okay, you can decide that.,’” Koa said.

“Something that we learned early on is that it’s hard with too many cooks in the kitchen. We could all talk on and on about what exactly we personally think is the best way to do something, and there are a lot of different ways to do one thing that could all be good in their own way, so something that we learned over time is to delegate to somebody that we trust and do what they think. They have the final say on those decisions.”

During Commit the Change’s first recruitment period in the fall of 2020, the founders suddenly realized the true potential of the club they’d started.

“Before we opened applications, we were like, ‘How many people are going to apply? If we get 20 people, we’ll be happy,’” Koa said.

“I remember for the written applications there were literally ninety-nine by the time we closed the form and we were like, ‘Oh my, we’re in a little over our heads,’ and then we accepted 60 people, and we were thinking, ‘Okay, this is good, if people drop off, we’ll still have at least hopefully thirty to forty members.’ And, yeah, some people dropped off, but we’re still over 60.”

Now, almost two years after that fateful meeting in March 2020, Commit the Change is still chugging along, better than the founders ever could have envisioned.

After the most recent Fall 2021 recruitment period, the club received one hundred and seventy applications, expanded to four nonprofit project partners, and held numerous in-person outings and on-campus events.

“It was crazy that everyone stayed. I don’t know, it’s good. It’s great, but it’s just really funny because I think all of us were kind of not trying to get our hopes up and then feel sad if our expectations weren’t met, but I feel all of our expectations have been exceeded, at this point,” Koa said.

Justice for Families

Sydney Chiang, Developer

Read about Justice for Families here.

Can you describe the software/product that you built?

One of the projects we worked on this year was a prototype Android and iOS forum app. It works similar to Reddit, where you have a main feed of community-populated text posts and users can interact through likes or comments.

Can you talk about any challenges and/or accomplishments?

A technical challenge I had working on the iOS app was understanding nested views and using those with a tab bar. For example, if you click through to people’s profiles, then their posts, then their profiles from the main feed, you would get three different navigation bars stacked on top of each other. Eventually, I was able to successfully display only one navigation bar at a time by adjusting the locations of where the views were created.

On a less technical level, this was the first time I experienced the process of submitting an iOS app to the app store or Testflight (Apple’s app testing service). It was interesting to see the qualifications that Apple is looking for in order to have an application approved by them. We had to make a few corrections and submit the app multiple times before it was approved.

What’s the status of the project now?

Grace, our point of contact, told us that she intended to expand the release of the project to the entire Justice for Families network, making up around thousands of individuals. Ideally, this will give clarity to whether a full-scale application would benefit Justice for Families and hopefully will create a channel of communication between the families of incarcerated youth.

Child Creativity Lab

Sonali Chellappa, Design Lead

Read about Child Creativity Lab here.

Can you describe the software/product that you built?

Our team designed an online dashboard for Child Creativity Labs’ administrators to securely store and organize important documents, including waivers from parents and volunteers. We also designed a web platform to host CCL’s video workshop lessons.

Can you talk about any challenges and/or accomplishments?

One accomplishment we made is making remote learning easier for children and parents through the video platform we created! CCL has not been able to host in-person workshops over the past year, resulting in students missing out on the hands-on learning experience that CCL offers. However, giving them access to these workshops online in the form of interactive lessons has allowed them to learn and explore STEAM topics at home!

What’s the status of the project now?

The project was completed in June and the non-profit is now making use of the waiver dashboard and video platform to improve their internal organization and expand their reach to students and parents all over Orange County!

Waymakers

Rostam Vakhshoori, Developer

Read about Waymakers here.

Can you describe the software/product that you built?

The software consisted of a volunteer system where volunteers are able to sign up and log hours for these events. Additionally, administration would be able to track inventory in their warehouses and view a user directory of everyone in the organization.

Can you talk about any challenges and/or accomplishments?

One of the challenges we faced was not generalizing components of the software. For example, teams would be working on creating button components that would do the same task rather than creating one generalized button component and using that. This issue led to many inconsistencies in the website and a lot of repetition in the code. We ended up generalizing many components halfway through the year and became much more efficient with our time. Another issue was the lack of communication between designers and developers which we combated through having meetings with everyone to get better feedback from both sides. Overall, I can confidently say that everyone got a good understanding of working in a startup-like environment while learning about key tools/workflows to become a software engineer.

What’s the status of the project now?

The project was successfully transferred over to Waymakers during the summer. The NPO is currently in the works of finalizing the logistics of the software to hand over to their employees.

Interested in Joining?

We are currently looking for designers and developers to join our project teams for the 2021–2022 school year. Please visit our website for more information and follow our social media below to keep in touch with us as we build Tech with Purpose.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ctc.uci/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/commit-the-change-uci/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ctc.uci/

Article written by Kamille Suayan, VP of Marketing

The Commit the Change team is ecstatic to present our third (and final) project for the 2020–2021 school year! We will be collaborating with the nonprofit, Waymakers, to electronically capture volunteer and inventory data for their community programs.

Mission

Waymakers’ mission is to build safer communities by helping individuals make their way through conflict and crisis to a place of strength and stability. They provide safe shelters for children, crisis rehabilitation therapy, counseling programs for at risk youth, and much more.

Problem

With over 30 people managing this organization, and thousands of people in communication, a massive amount of data gets generated, stored, and passed around. However, most of Waymakers’ internal processes are kept through paper and repeatedly printed, copied, and distributed. This wastes away thousands of hours each year which could be better spent helping individuals through conflict.

Solution

To solve this problem, we will be creating an internal dashboard to store information regarding new volunteers, organization inventory for donations, victim information, and other internal processes. This dashboard will serve as a central information store that can be used by anyone managing the organization. We will be saving this organization thousands of hours and dollars each year on operational costs.

Impact

Through the completion of this project, Waymakers will have a streamlined process for storing their internal data. They will save thousands of dollars on printing and manual labor costs, and can focus directly on their mission to build safer communities.

Want to learn more about Waymakers? Visit their website: here.

Want to learn more about Commit the Change? Visit our website: here.

Does this project interest you? Join Commit the Change today! Apply here.

Authored By: Albert Zhang (President & Founder)

Edited By: Justine Koa (Internal Vice President & Founder), Kayla Tran (External Vice President & Founder)