Wave, marketed as “a digitized school community platform,” is the Hill School’s app that manages students and their locations. Because of Wave, faculty members can easily find students as well as track any COVID-19 symptoms. Virtually everyone on campus uses Wave on a daily basis. 

What some community members might not know is that Wave was created by two Hill alumni when they were students: Jingyu Cai ‘19 and Max Tsiang ‘19. Both alumni are currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science: Cai at the University of Chicago and Tsiang at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Cai and Tsiang started Wave as a project during afternoon tech time with then computer science instructor Damian Baraty. According to Tsiang, Baraty jokingly said that if someone were to create a better REACH, he would build a statue of them on campus (For context, REACH is a boarding school app similar to Wave that Hill utilized in the past).  

Cai and Tsiang decided to take on this challenge and collaborated with Ari Baum, dean of students, and David Allain, director of information and technology service. By keeping their end-users in mind, they wanted to optimize Wave as much as possible. According to Tsiang, the development process took one to two years since it was a part-time project, and they also wanted to be intentional with the design and features. 

The first year that REACH was replaced by Wave was 2019. Now, due to COVID-19, Hill has increased its usage of the app. Throughout these past two years, Tsiang and Cai have been learning a lot about the software development process and making modular software to adapt to ongoing changes. 

Initially, Tsiang and Cai were aiming to produce a “version two” that functioned more like commercial software, but they soon realized that working with other schools is a quite difficult and arduous process. For, now they plan to just focus on providing the software to Hill and catering it as much as possible for their alma mater. 

Currently, Hill has a two-year contract with Wave. According to Wave’s website, its standard plan is $15/month/user. 

“We provided a discount for Hill for the two years since we appreciate the opportunity that Hill has given us to take on Wave: it’s an amount that we and Hill both feel happy with,” Tsiang said. He also added that both he and Cai are hopeful that Hill will continue to partner with them.

Both developers want Hill to know that Wave was not an individual project, but rather a group effort. 

“We had a lot of help from our friends and teachers. Even from day one, brainstorming the initial idea, to having to borrow phones to test and demo a rough version to ITS and the Deans’ Office, we had a lot of help from our friends. Most of all, we are grateful for the people at Hill that we had the opportunity to meet,” they said.  

Tsiang and Cai said one thing they wish they’d known before graduating is that “the Three Brother’s California burrito is honestly the best burrito we’ve ever had (not sponsored).” They then added, “In all seriousness, we also wish we knew that it is OK to not have everything figured out (and neither of us have figured it out even now). It was definitely not smooth sailing at Hill: we’ve made mistakes, had rough weeks, and as much as we wish we had never experienced that back then, we are grateful for how it shaped us and how we learned from it, and in the end, we turned out OK.