Campus Maps, a new app designed to help students find their way around campus, recently launched at Syracuse University.

Available online or on a smartphone, Campus Maps is an interactive map tool developed by University of Maryland alumnus Vikram Bhandari. Users choose where they need to go from the app’s list of buildings, and Campus Maps does the rest. The entire process takes seven seconds, Bhandari said. The map for the SU campus features 98 different locations, according to the Campus Maps website.

Bhandari created the app for personal use during his sophomore year at Maryland. He said he had just received his second semester schedule and was overwhelmed at the prospect of finding all his new classes, especially the ones in buildings he had never been to.

Taking matters into his own hands, Bhandari decided to create an app for his smartphone that streamlined the process of locating and walking to buildings on Maryland’s campus. It worked so well for him that eventually he decided to post the app online for other students to download. The app was an immediate success, he said.

“I had it on my phone and I would use it, so I figured I would put it on the app store,” Bhandari said. “I put it on the week before classes started, and it just went viral. I stopped believing the numbers at one point.”

The number of downloads quintupled the first year and tripled the next.

To expand the app’s reach, Bhandari is mapping all the “big” schools. That’s where SU comes in.

“At heart, I’m still very data driven,” he said, “What I wanted to know is, with limited resources, how do I reach the most students? Well, if I hit the top hundred schools, I’ll reach 80 percent of students in the U.S. And that’s crazy.”

Other schools that Campus Maps has expanded to serve include Arizona State University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Ohio State University. The app is available on 100 college campuses and seven of the 15 schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference, including SU, use the app.

Bhandari said he found that Google Maps wasn’t much help for students in navigating campus, which was part of the inspiration for his app. Campus Maps aims to combat that problem through strong quality control and direct feedback from students.

To map a campus, Bhandari first finds all the buildings at a high level and puts them in a list. Next, he aggregates all official, interactive maps of the school and matches them up as a way to cross-reference. Then, he uses the data he’s gathered to create the final map, which he then uploads to the Campus Maps application.

Jared Birchmore, an undeclared freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, said he sees the app coming in handy for everyone, but freshman especially.

“I can see it being extremely helpful for first semester freshman who just barely know the general idea of campus,” Birchmore said.

Matt Costa, a freshman marketing management major, agrees.

“It would save time, for sure. Syracuse isn’t an overwhelmingly huge campus, but it’s still hard to find where you’re going sometimes,” Costa said.

Bhandari has made it his personal mission to help students like Costa, and said he hopes Campus Maps can reach as many schools as possible.

“This is what I view as making a difference. There’s no one map source for every campus in the U.S. and that feels wrong to me,” Bhandari said. “I just want to build an app that people love and use and gets you where you need to go.”

Published on January 26, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Brigid: brkenned@syr.edu