How Quad works
Quad is a place for creative and academic minds to meet: somewhere students, faculty and staff can say what they are working on, find the people who want to work on it with them, and keep growing together.
The idea
A university is one of the densest collections of talent anywhere. Thousands of people, all making something, mostly unaware of each other. The introductions that change a project usually happen by luck: a corridor, a shared supervisor, a party.
Quad makes those introductions on purpose. You write a line about what you are making right now. Somebody searching that subject finds you, and the conversation starts there.
What you put in
Your profile is yours to write. Quad does not read your student record or your staff record, and there is nothing for your university to switch on. You say what you are working on, what you are interested in, and what you are open to.
Your name, university, school and role are visible to everyone on Quad — they are how people recognise you. Everything else is yours to add when you are ready, in your profile.
Who is here
Undergraduates, PhD students, faculty, researchers, lab staff, librarians, the people who run the workshops. Everyone at a university, not one corner of it. That is what the university email address is for: it is the one thing Quad checks, and it means the person who replies to you is who they say they are.
Your campus, and every other one
Your email address decides which campus is yours. A columbia.edu address joins Columbia, and only Columbia — that is what makes a campus here mean something, and why the person replying to you is really in the building they say they are.
It does not limit what you can see. You land on your own campus and it is always one click away in the top bar, but you can read, search and reply right across every university on Quad. The best collaborator for a project is sometimes two hundred miles away, and a good idea has no reason to stop at a campus boundary.
Which universities
Quad opens with the Ivy League and grows from there, a set of campuses at a time. Choosing who joins next is deliberate: a network is only worth being part of if you can trust who is in it.
If you are at a university that is not here yet and you want it to be, or you work in a university technology office and want to talk about doing this properly, that conversation is welcome.
How it works
- Your profile is opt-in. Beyond your name, university, school and role, nothing appears unless you put it there.
- No timetables. Quad has no field for a class time, a room, a building or a date of birth, so nobody can be located by their schedule.
- No third-party trackers. What Quad counts, it counts here, from things people did on it. Nothing is sold and nothing is shared. The detail is on the privacy page.