A new application has emerged on Facebook this semester, giving students the opportunity to take advantage of services like those Ebay and others offer — ULOOP.
According to Cayla Noble, a freshman in biochemistry and a campus representative for ULOOP, ULOOP is a free online classified section but is exclusive to the students, staff and faculty at N.C. State.
Freshman in computer engineering Keeshan Ganatra said he thinks ULOOP is a great idea.
“It is similar to craigslist.org, but it seems much safer, [with] less frauds and scams,” Ganatra said.
Students can use ULOOP to search for jobs and internships, sell textbooks, find housing and roommates and even find rides home.
“ULOOP is much easier to use than other online classified sites since everything posted on there is local,” Noble said. “It’s really easy to search for sublets or other items. It’s free and the site itself is geared to N.C. State students.”
According to the ULOOP Web site, it was started in January 2007 at the University of California at Santa Barbara and has spread to colleges across the country due to its success there. It came to NCSU this semester.
Dejah Anderson, a sophomore in aerospace engineering, said the site is slowly becoming more popular.
“It seems like it’s a pretty useful site though still developing,” Anderson said. “I’ve really only used it to look for textbooks, apartments and flipping through the job listings.”
According to Noble, ULOOP has been advertised to the campus through posted flyers, online marketing and Facebook. She also said that her fellow ULOOP representative, Travis Varner, dressed up in a gorilla suit and a ULOOP t-shirt and ran around the Brickyard and into classrooms to promote the online classified site.
“He was only supposed to run around in the Brickyard, but then he started going into classrooms before classes,” Noble said. “He drummed up some good publicity for ULOOP as well as entertaining the campus.”
All a person needs to register for ULOOP is a university e-mail address. Registration and use of the site are free.
The site may be in its infancy, but several students said they are optimistic about its future.
“With more people using it, I think ULOOP has the potential of being a great resource for students,” Anderson said. “It’s good to have a site like this just for N.C. State.”