By Camille De Ripainsel
When entering the AUC dorms, everyone is greeted by a maze of endless corridors, confusing entrances, and room numbers that seem to follow a random order. This has always been the case, until a link on the AUC Student Association (AUCSA) website appeared and saved the day. No more wandering from the middle to the last building and back again, just type a room number into “Roomfinder”. With a single click, it provides you with all the information about a room’s location.
For those curious enough to look, the page quietly credits its creator: Terts Diepraam, a science major from the class of 2020 who now works as a professional programmer. He laughed at the idea that his creation was still guiding students through the dorms, but had guessed that the tool was still in use. He found its popularity both hilarious and slightly ridiculous. For a piece of software he made in a couple of afternoons, Diepraam admitted.“I expected it to be gone from the website already.”
Diepraam recounted the chaos of the pre-Roomfinder era. When having to locate a friend’s room, “You’d always have to give the full location, I’m in room this number, it’s this floor, on this side, of that building.”
Out of that everyday shared frustration, an idea began to take shape. Diepraam and some friends in their third year were venting about how exhausting it had been to constantly explain where their rooms were. At some point, a friend joked that there should just be an app that tells you where it is, and suggested that Diepraam could probably build it. At first, Diepraam brushed it off, as “it was mostly joking around and not actually believing we could do this, but somebody kept joking about it until I was like: Okay fine”
Turning the idea into a tool, however, required more than just humour; after finding a detailed map of the dorms, he matched numbers with floors, buildings, and entrances and manually put it into a big spreadsheet. From there, recalling the coding itself was created within a day: “It was actually quite simple, it was just a lot of typing,” says Diepraam. Although Roomfinder was a simple project for him, Diepraam recounts an argument over whether the current white background could have been a tie-dye image or when he traced the shape of the building from Google Maps: “It is a nice memory, it reminds me how fun it was with my friends,” Diepraam says.
To spread the word, Diepraam first sent Roomfinder to a few friends. It then made its way to “AUorgie,” the Class of 2020 group chat. While at AUC, Diepraam had a sense that some people were using the tool, but he never imagined it would become a campus essential to this day. He only realised its impact years after graduating, when his sister happened to meet someone from AUC, who, upon hearing her last name, asked if she knew the ‘Roomfinder-guy’. For Diepraam, it was surreal: “It was really weird”, he says, laughing.
What started as a joke between friends has now become a piece of campus culture. Thanks to Roomfinder, countless generations of students continue to navigate AUC’s dorm-maze with ease, even long after its creator has moved on. In a place where people constantly come and go, something as simple as a clickable map outlasted the years, always guiding students back home.
The Herring 