Cornell Lifted

Apr 2024 - Present

ReactNext.jsFlaskSupabaseOIDC AuthLDAP

Over the course of my senior year, I led two peer-to-peer gratitude events with 7,500+ participants. Lifted is a beloved tradition at Cornell, and I led a team to take this event to the next level. As part of this initiative, I built a full-stack web app to facilitate the event and automate repetitive processes (e.g., emails, PDF conversion), which has saved us dozens of hours and eliminated countless errors from previous manual processes. The site currently sees approximately 7,500+ active users each year. Although I have graduated, I still maintain the web app and assist with the event planning each year.

Cornell Lifted is a fully student-run semesterly tradition where Cornellians come together to lift the spirits of their friends, faculty, and staff at Cornell on the last day of classes! It's a time to express gratitude, spread positivity, and watch Cornell transform into a vibrant landscape of heartfelt messages on the last day of classes.

Lifted is quite a difficult project to pull off, both logistically and technically. On the user-facing side, it requires Cornellians to send messages and become notified of messages sent to them. On the backend, it requires verifying that senders inputted the correct recipient NetID, converting messages into PDFs, printing messages, sending thousands of emails, send eLifted messages, and so much more. Previously, each of these processes took countless hours of manual work.

After helping organize Lifted for a semester, I decided to create a web app to automate most of these processes. The web app allows Cornellians to sign in with their NetID, search for others by name, and send messages. Recipients are automatically emailed when they've been sent a message ("Surprise! You've been Lifted!") and senders can edit and delete their own messages if they choose. Recipients can also view any eLifted messages sent to them. Finally, the web app contains a fully-fledged admin dashboard, which allows Lifted admin to manage the form, view all messages, convert messages into PDFs, configure automated emails, enable/disable viewing messages, and more.

We piloted half of these features during the Fall 2024 semester's Lifted for about 2,500 participants and it was a big success. We fully utilized this web app for the Spring 2025 semester, where we had over 7,500 participants!