CASE STUDY ESSAY
This Case Study is part of the application process for the 2 0 1 5 full-time MBA programme at
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Please carefully read the New York Times article on the
following pages and answer the questions below in the field provided. Please write no more than one
page (500 words).
What do you think about the apps created by the college students?
How you define innovation? Please give examples of ground-breaking innovations.
What do you think is necessary to create business innovations?
Applicant name
Date
Article sourced from The New York Times. This article remains the Copyright of The New York Times and was originally published
in 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
By Ariel Kaminer
Vaibhav Verma was frustrated that he could not get into the most popular courses at Rutgers University, so he
decided to try a new approach.
He didn’t sleep outside classrooms to be first in line when the door opened, or send professors a solicitous note.
Instead, he built a web-based application that could repeatedly query the New Jersey university’s registration
system. As soon as anyone dropped the class, Mr. Verma’s tool would send him a message, and he would grab
the open spot.
“I built it just because I was a little bit bored,” he said.
By the next semester, 8,000 people had used it.
At Brown University, Jonah Kagan had a clever idea of his own: Get his fellow students to name their three
favorite courses, and use the results as a guide for people seeking great, unusual electives. Building the website
was easy, but he could not persuade Brown to give him enrollment figures, which would have allowed him to
control for differences in class size. So the survey died.
Experiences like those two are becoming common at campuses around the country, as students are showing up
the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, more informative and generally just
better versions of the information systems at the heart of undergraduate life.
Students now arriving for fall semester may find course catalogs that they can instantly sort and re-sort
according to every imaginable search criteria. Scheduling programs that allow someone to find the 47 different
classes that meet Thursdays at 8:30 p.m., then narrow them down to those that have no prerequisites, then
narrow again to those that count toward requirements in two majors. Or apps that allow you to see what courses
your friends are considering, or figure out who has the same free periods that you do, or plot the quickest route
between two far-flung classrooms.
But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced
colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.
Last year 19 students at Baruch College in Manhattan used a computer script to check for openings in crowded
courses — at such high frequency that they nearly took down not just Baruch’s computer system but also that of
the entire City University of New York. That earned them a stern talking-to. On the other hand, the scheduling
app that two University of California, Berkeley, students devised worked so well that administrators decided to
adapt it for official use.
These encounters have proved to be educational, though not always in the way the colleges intend.
“What I really learned,” Mr. Kagan said of his negotiations with Brown, “is how hard it is to get the data you
need out of these old legacy school information systems.”
To some extent, the tension reflects a basic difference in worldview.
“Students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies can,” said Harry R.
Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard’s computer science department, “since bureaucracies
tend to have messages they want to spin, and priorities they have to set, and students just want stuff that is
useful. I know this well, since students were talking to me about moving the Harvard face books online seven
years before Zuckerberg just went and did it without asking permission.”
Zach Hall saw that up close when, as a student at Furman University, he developed a course-selection website
that included a wide array of useful functions. “Classget.com beat the socks off the course listings that the
university was putting out there,” recalled Brad Barron, the registrar at the South Carolina institution. But,
worried that it might harm the university’s computer system, Mr. Hall recalled, “the I.T. department kind of