Jeff Bollinger

I was recently asked by a few students what they can be doing to get ahead before graduating.  The conversation caused me to go back an dust off an article I published in 2006 regarding my personal experiences leveraging opportunities during college.  This is a revised version of the original post:

Starting Something

In the fall of 1999, I was about 2 weeks into my freshman year at SCSU when I stumbled upon the university’s student web system, a way for students to publish their own websites. Intrigued by the ability to create my own site, I started to explore.  After contemplating the possibilities I decided upon creating some sort of snowboarding related site, a passion of mine at the time.  After becoming hooked on my new found ability to publish to the masses, I quickly found myself spending just about every waking moment outside classes working on the project.  This all eventually led to creation of BoardingPlanet.com , an exploratory project turned startup business, which in retrospect turned out to be one of the more influential experiences in my life.

I was pretty green to start, only knowing HTML and some JavaScript from a AOL member page I had created for my band in high school.  I knew there was more out there but didn’t have much direction.  My declared major at the time was Electrical Engineering, so I had a “C for Engineers” class where I picked up the C language.  I found some resources on the web regarding PERL which is pretty close syntactically with C, so I gave it try.  The first dynamic version of BoardingPlanet included some messy PERL scripts for sending form data to an email address.  The next evolution of BP came when I picked up on the PHP/MySQL stack.  I still remember to this day being introduced to MySQL by a friend who at the time was running a similar site focused on the MN skateboarder community.  I had ridiculously been writing data to flat files.  Needless to say, the discovery of databases was an epiphany moment.  PHP was also awesome.  It was great language for people getting started in web application development as it was freely available and had an extremely strong user community.

Project Turned Passion

At some point BoardingPlanet had become more than just a side project, it was a passion.  Features like a member system (think Facebook for snowboarders), film reviews, interviews and streaming radio consumed just about every free minute of my time, which ended up being something like 9PM – 4AM daily.  I probably re-factored every feature in the site about once a month as I learned the ropes of application design and best practices.  As I stumbled upon new things like the PHP GD library, I would dream up features to exploit it.  My friends at the time thought I was crazy spending so much time on the site.  SCSU's culture at the time was completely inverse to what I was doing (and probably still is).  Most of my friends looked at school as means to a degree which would ultimately get you a job at huge company like General Mills, Cargill or Best Buy.  They really didn't get it, but I didn't let it bother me too much.

It wasn’t just a nerd fest either.  As the site grew, I spent a good amount of time on editorial content, marketing and business development.  On the marketing end, I had built up relationships with other snowboarding sites which drove a significant amount of traffic to the site.  The byproduct of those relationships was also a solid amount of organic search listings.  Other grassroots marketing initiatives (some ideas good, some bad) included printing up 10,000 stickers to give away for free, posters at local ski resorts and flyers in local board shops.  Still today one loan BP sticker exists on the “No parking sign” on the south side of Ritchie Auditorium at SCSU.  Each year I did snowboarding film reviews, mostly as an excuse to get videos for free.  I’d write up emails to the production or distribution companies requesting copies for review, most of them gladly complied.  I also scored other random stuff for the purpose of reviewing, including skateboards, snowskates and even a snow making machine (that was fun).

Sometime in 2000 I received an offer from a company to acquire the site which was quite the memorable moment.  After the excitement settled down I reached out the universities free legal advice group for their perspective, which was a great learning experience.  While I ended up declining the offer, it was a remarkable feeling to have outside validation that what I was building was actually worth something in the market.

Sometime around the start of my senior year of college I started to diverge from BoardingPlanet, spending more time on freelance web work, running the E-Business Club on campus and working on other projects.  After 2 or 3 hosting moves, BoardingPlanet.com was eventually lost in the shuffle.  Today the site is gone, but the experience of building it was life changing.

Moral of the story

College is one of the most unique opportunities in your lifetime, take advantage of it.  There is a lot going on inside of the classroom, but there is even more outside of that.  Exploring the world of software development, business, or whatever your major is, outside of academia is key to hitting the ground running when you complete your degree.

Students may think they don’t have a lot of free time for this type of thing in college with classes, homework and social life, but the reality is once you hit the workforce, get married and have kids your time is even more scarce.  Use the resources that college gives you: time, professors, other students, clubs and organizations.  These opportunities are harder to come by once you are graduated.  So go ahead, start something your passionate about while you’re in school and come out with more than just a degree.