UT01

UT01 is a free, student-built collection of resources for The University of Texas at Austin. It brings practical campus information and community projects into one public site.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

A new student at a large university spends the first weeks on a strange kind of homework: finding things. Where do you check a grade? Which portal holds the tuition bill, and which one holds the insurance waiver? Is UT Direct the same as MyUT? Every answer exists somewhere on an official page, and every official page assumes you already know which office to ask.

USTC students solved this years ago with one page. USTC Navigation, made by Hypercube and the ustclife contributors, puts the services a student needs on a single screen, and students set it as their browser homepage.

UT01 is that idea brought to Austin. I forked the USTC Navigation code in June 2025 and rebuilt the content for UT.

What is on the page

About 70 links, grouped into 12 sections a student actually thinks in:

• Key portals and support: MyUT, UT Direct, Canvas, UT Police, emergency and medical information
• Academics and registration: grades, course schedules, the academic calendar, libraries
• Before the semester: admission status, registration guides, insurance guides for new students
• Tuition and insurance waivers
• Health and mental health: appointments, counseling, wellness
• UT AI: the university’s AI tools guide and related services
• Financial: tuition bills, financial aid, direct deposit, tax forms
• Campus life: housing, dining, maps, buses, parking, recreation
• Legal and other support: legal help, disability services, Title IX, the ombuds office
• Technology: email, VPN, storage, the IT help desk
• International student services
• Employment: career services and the job portal

There is a search box, and a short guide for setting the page as your homepage in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and on a phone.

Design choices

One screen. A navigation page competes with the browser’s address bar. If finding the link on UT01 takes longer than typing a search, nobody will use it. Grouping by the student’s question, rather than by the university’s org chart, is what keeps it fast.

No data collection. UT01 has no forms, no logins, and no scripts that touch credentials. Every entry is a plain hyperlink to the official site. A student tool that sits next to the university login page has to be obviously safe, or it should not exist.

Open and forkable. The code is under CC BY-SA 4.0, the same license as the original. Anyone can fix a broken link by opening an issue on GitHub, and any other campus can fork it the way I forked USTC’s.

UT01 is not official and not endorsed by UT Austin. The page says so, and it tells readers to confirm details on the university’s own sites.

Why it is worth maintaining

A link directory looks trivial. The value is in the curation. Universities reorganize their websites often, offices rename their portals, and links break quietly. A student-maintained page catches those changes because students hit them first.

The bigger lesson for me was about reuse. The fastest way to help a new community was to take something that already worked for another one, credit it properly, and adapt it. The USTC page had years of student feedback built into its layout. I got that for free.

A good tool for newcomers is one that the people who arrived last year keep fixing.

Visit UT01.