Bruinwalk.com

Bruinwalk.com is operated by the students and staff of Student Media UCLA

Bruinwalk.com is a website operated by Student Media UCLA that features UCLA professor reviews, used book trading and reviews of apartments near UCLA’s Westwood campus. The site also features a campus calendar and is currently building a database of information and media about the people and entities that make up the UCLA community.

This beta version of the redesigned Bruinwalk.com was launched on March 24, 2011.

Bruinwalk.com is published by the UCLA Communications Board, which is the board of directors for the student-run media on campus. The Communications Board also publishes the Daily Bruin, Bruin Life, UCLA’s official yearbook, as well as seven magazines (Al-Talib, Fem, Ha'Am, La Gente, Nommo, and Pacific Ties) and UCLAradio.com, the campus radio station.

History

Bruinwalk.com was founded in 1998 by former Daily Bruin editor in chief and Communications Board chairman, Patrick Kerkstra. Originally designed to serve as a Yahoo-style portal for the campus, early versions featured news from the Daily Bruin and wire services. The idea to take the name of the thoroughfare that connects the residence halls to the heart of the campus was suggested by Scott Kim, a student advertising manager at the Daily Bruin, who understood that Bruinwalk.com was trying to become the online equivalent.

In 1999, Bruinwalk.com began to focus on serving web mail to UCLA students. Student developers Landis Olsen and Spencer Lee built a web mail system that offered address books and spell check, features not offered by the university’s email system until later. Other features included online file storage and forums.

In 2001, Avishai Shraga led the next generation of student developers as they created Bruinwalk.com’s professor review feature, which was designed by Brian Donovan. As Bruinwalk.com discontinued email, it became more focused on facilitating community-generated content and services.

The next version of Bruiwalk.com saw the addition of social networking. The student staff at Bruinwalk.com, which was led by Justin Hartung, created a social networking platform that launched at about the same time facebook.com did in 2004. At its peak, about 4,000 UCLA students used the Bruinwalk.com social network before facebook supplanted it.

Bruinwalk was redeveloped in 2007 by David Martin and Weston Neilson, who rewrote Bruinwalk in Django, an open source language and set the stage for this iteration of the web site.

Interested in working at Bruinwalk.com?

If you're interested in working as a developer or content producer (writer, videographer or photographer) for Bruinwalk.com and other sites published by Student Media UCLA—or if you have an idea that you would like to produce for the campus—email us at bruinwalk@media.ucla.edu.