A new check-in app for student activities and events made its debut appearance at the beginning of this school year.
CORQ—a mobile app for discovering nearby events from student organizations on campus and checking-in to said events— was introduced in part of the package deal with CampusLabs Engage.
Florida Tech’s Engage is a platform similar to OrgSync, where student organizations and clubs can manage their engagement with members and track involvement.
According to the Campus Labs website, Engage “reflects the best of our two current systems, CollegiateLink and OrgSync, that emphasizes simplicity, mobility and ease of use.”
The migration from the platforms was announced on June 6 through a school email by Cat Nanney, director of student involvement, with the transition period between platforms taking place from July 11 to early August.
Instead of swiping student IDs, CORQ is now used to check students in using a QR code with their name attached that they can save to Google Pay or Apple Pay.
Residence life and student life first learned about the app in early August during training for the new school year.
According to Nanney, both Florida Tech Engage and CORQ have been heavily advertised to incoming freshmen through flyers and social media.
“The feedback from the new system has been very positive as students have real-time information on what is going on around campus,” Nanney said.
Marifer Sagastume, a Southgate resident assistant, said the app can be a tool for ResLife events.
“The app is very easy to use, and the new scanning process was very straightforward,” Sagastume said. “I don’t like how it makes you login using TRACKS every time you want to start scanning people in your event.”
Sagastume also mentioned that another app is used to scan people for events, called Campus Labs Event Check-in App that uses the phone’s camera.
CORQ is not the first app on campus to try to connect students to various events.
A similar app, We.We, was created last year by mechanical engineering students Mario Acosta and Daniel Hochiemy, with the goal of allowing students to “connect with people on campus to do the same activities you love.”
Acosta and Hochiemy had goals of achieving the same features as CORQ; however, the app did not “suit the school’s needs,” according to Nanney.
“We tried very hard to make that app work for our students since we are proud that our students were making this program,” Nanney said. “But it simply did not work for us with Engage in place.”
We.We was promoted through flyers and through word of mouth by SGA and Residence Life, and the feedback was positive according to the developers.
“We got great love and support from ResLife and provided them the app as a trial run from the beginning of the year to the end of the spring semester,” Hochiemy said. “We gained more than 800 total users in that semester.”
However, since the app was separate from the previous student engagement tool OrgSync, the cross integration between the two was not a viable option for organization leaders in keeping student records.
“We are very disheartened about the situation because of how much progress we made to make our platform viable,” Hochiemy said. “Though we completely understand the confusion that could have been made transitioning from OrgSync to Engage [and CORQ].”
While We.We proved to show inconsistencies with other platforms already in play at Florida Tech, the new integration of CORQ for student involvement on campus will become the new pass for everyday campus life.