RU-SAFE Campus Security System

Among many iterations of our pitch, the opening line I remember most was “Do you feel safe right now?”. For obvious reasons, we scrapped it, but it’s a fond reminder of the many many hours I spent writing our pitches, then saying them back to myself with different deliveries, trying to make every single word matter as much as possible.

The Idea

I will be honest, I was not passionate about this project at first. I got looped into doing the Verizon Smart Campus Competition by a few friends, but I wasn’t all in yet. Not nearly. I came up with a few ideas. I listened to a few of my teammates’ ideas. All overdone. Bus optimization algorithms, point-cloud real estate mapping, all very useful ideas, but their scope was so limited. It was all Rutgers-based, which wasn’t a problem, but it was Rutgers-only, which was. Then, a friend was inspired by a Rutgers crime alert (an email notification, often delayed, to let students know about recent crimes on campus), and suggested that we come up with a way to fix that.

I’ll be the first to admit that it took me quite a while to really get on board with it. I thought, “Security? But that’s not cool. It doesn’t have a nice ring to it that sounds impressive.” But that was the idea we decided on, and we went into it. We came up with a name, an idea of our scope, and an outline for how we were going to pitch it. We recorded a two-minute video, then submitted it in about November, then I thought that was that and I’d never hear about it again.

Round 2

A few months of nothingness later, we were notified that we were moving on to the second round of the competition. It seemed like our idea had finally gotten some wheels. At this point, I realized that if we were to win this competition, I had to step up and become the group lead, and make sure everyone was doing what they did best. Our efforts at this point were haphazard but spirited, and it took some organizing to get everyone to help out where they could help best. Eventually, we made it to the second round event, which was a poster-based pitch. Our two-minute pitches were rehearsed down to a T, we wore matching red and black outfits, and we had a somewhat functioning mockup of a front-end. We made it through, and so did some of the teams we made friends with, so we were happy.

The Glorious Pitch

We were then told we had four weeks until the final pitch. A ten-minute presentation with five minutes at the end for questions. The judges would be Verizon professionals, Rutgers deans, and otherwise very smart, very experienced people. The stakes were on. We made the executive decision to step up our matching red and black outfits to include suit jackets. Some of us focused on making a functioning front-end. I made a functioning back-end. This back-end could use your device’s camera to watch events unfold on the screen, then analyze it to detect weapons and aggressive motions. That alone took me two weeks. After that, we started working on our demo. We knew that if we wanted to win, it would have to be electric.

And it was. We knew our pitch was going to be the winning pitch. We were casual and professional, funny but serious, and after several practice runs, we were good. The day of, we did a few final tweaks to our demo, making sure that the parameters for our prototype were tuned so when my teammate was going to stab me with a fake knife mid-presentation, our algorithm’s alarm bells would start ringing and everyone in the room would get a notification less than thirty seconds later.

We asked the hosts if we could go last, because our pitch required a somewhat complicated setup with my phone and laptop on different sides of the stage. That, and we wanted our presentation to be the one that stuck with everyone. Our introduction, minus a small hiccup where a teammate blanked for a split second, was amazing. People were laughing along with us, and when my teammate took out the knife to stab me (again, it’s a fake knife, don’t worry), the anticipation in the room was exactly what we were going for: electric.

Then it failed. The camera couldn’t start, no matter how much we tried. Maybe because it was too far, or that I received a phone call mid-demo. Whatever it was, our demo completely collapsed, and we were forced to resort to the backup pictures on our slide deck.

The Many Takeaways

We recovered as best we could, but with a presentation that’s intrinsically reliant on your demo, there’s only so much you can do without said demo. And so, when the winners were announced, we were disappointed, if not terribly surprised, that we weren’t among them.

Despite not winning, though, this was one of my most impactful projects ever. I learned a great deal about developing a product, both from the technical side and from the “is this actually something people want” side. If I had to do it differently, I think I would’ve done some more research in the beginning and really understood what students actually wanted for campus security, and if Big Brother Lite was a part of that. Despite that, I learned a lot, and it’s probably one of the biggest projects that secured me my internship and first professional experience.