At a school as large as the University of Michigan, it can be hard to keep up with the never-ending, cleverly titled Facebook invitations, the Diag-wide food festivals and your favorite fraternity’s themed late-nights. Business sophomore Mark Dager and Information junior Rachel Sartori are bringing an app to campus that could provide a solution.
Turn Uh is an app allowing students to view and add events that are happening on and around campus. The platform — created by Bucknell University students Will Szamosszegi and Lucas Gregory — launched at Bucknell last year and is now expanding to other schools, including the University of Michigan.
“At each of the schools (Szamosszegi) has hired interns,” Dager said. “We reached out to every relevant business on campus — a discount, or a concert, or a play — stuff that students can’t find on their own, things that students would want to go to and would want to hear about.”
Sartori discussed how useful she found Turn Uh to be when she found the app.
“I came across it in Handshake when I was looking for internships last summer,” she said. “I am a marketing intern, so I came up with the marketing strategy, which we will be implementing throughout the year.”
Dager said what sets this app apart from others in its category is that it includes events from local businesses, the University itself and Greek life.
“I don’t think there’s another app where you can go and find Greek, local, and sports, businesses and club events,” he said.
The Greek Life tab on the app, however, is currently undergoing design changes, Dager noted.
“(Szamosszegi) has four programmers in India, and they’re reprogramming it,” Dager elaborated. “We input the chapters and once the chapters get on board they can post their events.”
Once this renovation is completed, Dager said he hopes Turn Uh will be a great tool for Greek recruitment and philanthropy events.
Sartori and Dager have been working to get the word out about Turn Uh. They tabled at Festifall this year, rolled out a Snapchat filter and handed out free T-shirts and laptop stickers.
“Freshman are where we want to start off,” Dager explained. “As a freshman you have no idea what you want to do or where to find things.”
Sartori said Turn Uh will positively impact campus culture.
“I think it’s really important because U of M is a really big school and it’s hard to know what’s going on at campus all the time,” he said.
LSA junior Megan Greenwood expressed interest in Turn Uh as it can be used as a place to hold all future event notices.
“I just get all these emails with events, so it would be nice to have it all in one place,” she said. “The only problem would be if they don’t have every single event … you have to have all of them.”
Turn Uh is free to download on the app store for iOS devices.