For many students, getting by in-and-outside of school is a burden of running around trying to situate one’s basic needs: finding tutors, buying and selling textbooks, looking for roommates, etc. Some students just want help. It’s a hassle maintaining one’s academic and residential livelihood while having to bounce between multiple websites, bulletin boards, and forums requesting help from fellow students who are in the same predicament.

Now there may be a solution.

Hani Gittens, Valencia College student and Valencia East Student Government Association president, and his team of developers have come up with an online interactive community for Valencia students at Vpost.co.

Gittens stated that last year the site reached more than 60,000 students before he had to shut the site completely down for maintenance — purchasing a new server and remolding the site.

After sitting with Gittens, he was able to go into finer details regarding Vpost.co, and what students can look forward to.

Valencia Voice (VV): I understand vpost.co is developed, created, and run all by you, is that correct?

Hani Gittens (HG): Yes. I started it last year as a student leader. My developers maintain the site constantly—24 hours. We do small maintenance overnight so it doesn’t restrict users during the day.

VV: So it’s always being updated?

HG: Yes, and monitored.

VV: Initially Vpost was discussed primarily as a platform for book exchanges, but it’s not just limited to that, is it?

It’s an interactive community per se. So you could find jobs, internships, sublease your apartment if you’re going to move out after half a year. You can sell textbooks to a varieties of items— cars, stuff like that. There’s also a student interactive blog where instructors can post forums on there and have students talk about it and respond, or students can post forums and engage, post, and ask questions.

Students can also get free Microsoft Office. Not a lot of students know that, and my site, step by step, shows students how to do that through Valencia.If you want to find out about an event we have a student opportunity page, so instead of having to find a flyer for an event you can take out your phone, got to the mobile version and pull up the events happening that day.

VV: To sum up Vpost, it’s a multipurpose site for Valencia students.

HG: Yea, anything they need to advance them in college, they have it.

VV: Anything else you want to mention?

HG: It’s free for all students. I’d love to hear [students’] input on the website and how we can improve it to better students’ experience.

(Taken from Oct. 2, 2014 issue)