Jay Rodrigues, a Cranston native, is founder and CEO of DormNoise LLC. He recently finished his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
PBN: What is DormNoise?
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RODRIGUES: DormNoise is an interactive collegiate calendar system that gives students a series of interconnected personal, student group and campus-wide calendars to organize all of their student events, and lets them sync everything to the most popular calendar applications and smartphones. Essentially, DormNoise solves a problem that all higher education organizations face: the absence of a centralized, online resource for personal, student group, and campus-related events and activities.
PBN: Could you give some examples of how students or schools are making good use of it?
RODRIGUES: Colleges and universities have used DormNoise to accomplish three main goals: first, to enhance communication and collaboration on a campus-wide basis; second, to improve student organization, engagement and awareness; and third, to increase student participation in events and student groups.
According to Kristin Goodenow, director of Clemson University’s Academic Advising Center, “DormNoise has allowed us to quickly communicate events to Clemson students as well as to get a more accurate picture of the events that students are attending. This helps us to plan more effectively and better utilize our resources for the community events that we are offering. In a time of shrinking budgets, this has – and will – prove invaluable to our college.”
PBN: You started developing DormNoise before you left for college. Where did you get the idea for it?
RODRIGUES: The original concept for DormNoise was a social-networking portal, exclusive to college students, that had a heavy emphasis on event planning. The idea came to me just before my high school graduation when I started getting Facebook friend requests from former high school teachers and friends of my parents. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to stay in touch with these people, yet I was not sure that Facebook, a site I used to keep in touch with my friends, was going to be the best environment for that. Plus, I was getting ready to go to college and did not know what kind of photographed shenanigans I would get myself into; not exactly the kind of stuff I would want my old math teacher to see on his Facebook news feed. As I experienced college firsthand and was able to truly identify the market need, DormNoise morphed into what it is today.
PBN: Google announced last month that it has created a new course-scheduling system called CloudCourse. Could this have any impact on DormNoise?
RODRIGUES: CloudCourse, which integrates with Google Calendar, can do nothing but help DormNoise.
DormNoise is not in the course-scheduling business, and we do not plan to enter it for a variety of reasons. However, DormNoise allows students to sync their personal DormNoise calendars, containing all of their personal, student group and campus-wide event information, with Google Calendar. Therefore, if students are pushing their CloudCourse information to Google Calendar, they can combine it with their event information from DormNoise.
PBN: How do you find time to run a startup company while being a full-time student?
RODRIGUES: The truth is, it’s very difficult. I have been forced to make a lot of sacrifices, but I know that it will be worth it in the end. The hardest part is making the transition from work life to student life; during the day I’ll be dealing with real-world issues, like managing my team or negotiating partnerships, and then at 8 p.m. I have to pick up a Management 101 textbook and read about “Porter’s Five Forces”; I am not trying to downgrade the value of education, it’s just hard making the adjustment.
To be honest, a lot of it is not thinking about it; if I thought about the amount of things I needed to get through each week, I would probably fold up shop and join the Peace Corps. •
