Waterloo and the university experience is truly what an individual makes it to be. A student can go their entire degree without taking advantage of the convenient opportunities that are unique to the undergraduate experience. Another student can branch out and find networking events, poetry slams, or even late-night poker games. Tony Qiu and Erica Han, are two UW students who realized that there are so many things happening in the UW community that they weren’t even aware of. As a solution, together, they made a central site designed for finding events for UW students called Wat2Do.
A screen capture of Wat2Do from October 2025. Photo Tiffany Wen
Qiu is a fourth-year student in management engineering and likes trying new things like dancing, rock climbing, and hiking. Han, who is in her fourth year of applied math, simply likes to live her life and do things, or in a simple word, experience. They met when they both happened to take advantage of an undergraduate opportunity — a trip to the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory hosted by WUSA.
The site is a tool Han has been searching for a long time due to the extensive time she has spent hunting for events. On a similar note, Qiu can pinpoint the exact moment the idea came to fruition. Han told Qiu about a hackathon for remote control cars and how she only signed up because there was a poser on a wall in E7. Without having seen that poster, they never would’ve known about the hackathon. Posters that are only posted in certain buildings or in areas students rush past are easy to miss.
With every club event posting you can possibly think of, their site makes navigating and figuring out what you want to do with your free time much easier than scouting on campus or searching on Instagram. Events that people otherwise wouldn’t have known about are in one area and filterable by interest type.
Han designed the site for a specific audience — UW students.” Wat2Do differentiates itself from other sites like Waterloo Commons or Luma by “limiting the scope for things by Waterloo students for Waterloo students,” she explains.
It took about two months for Qiu and Han to share the site with the public, though they continue to tweak and improve it. Han said within the past week, she implemented a new process to counteract issues with Instagram’s anti-bot measures, help it better track information, and ensure that all events are captured. Both describe a trial and error process, implementing things learned throughout the journey.
Qiu primarily works on designing the website and making the front end while Han mainly works on getting events and putting data in a database. They’ve learned different things from exposure to data processing and more about managing data. “Events don’t have end dates and might have multiple, and managing that real data has given me a lot of experience,” Qiu states.
In total, Qiu has spent about 500 hours on the site and Han’s first thought in the morning now is to see if there are new events being added. She states, “It’s instinctual… I look at it everyday… We have to be intentional with not burning ourselves out. It’s a passion project but also work.”
They have also consciously made it a point to ensure that they will never run ads on the site and have the source code free to view and use. Even with the code accessible online for people to use, it comes with the exception that others also can’t run ads.
Qiu describes the collaboration process by recognizing that while bugs can be worked on separately, decisions can largely impact the other’s work, so “being in the same room is more efficient.” Han said the two use the concept of “rubber ducking” in which “people put a duck on their desk and talk to it to solve their problem.”
“We rubber duck each other by speaking [our] problems out loud and maybe getting feedback,” Han said. “Sometimes it just needs to be voiced.”
As for the future of the site, the two creators have plans to help highlight clubs and promote their events, create an Instagram profile for the site, and continue to spread the community-driven site through word of mouth. They plan to create a version of Spotify Wrapped for the site with different insights from clubs.
The two-person team continues to market on their own, funding the cloud costs and third party services out of their own pockets to continue expanding their passion project. On a larger scale, they talk about curating it for other campuses, but would need to look at ways that can make it more general. “There’s probably lots of UW specific things in the code,” [who] said.
Han and Qiu appreciate any feedback from designers or really anyone with an opinion: “[We] are fundamentally programmers… We were at a designathon event and some of the designs were mind-blowing.” So, they invite people to give their opinion or even reach out for potential collaboration.
Feedback can be left through the contact page on Wat2Do.
