I have been discussing this with a friend, and we believe that this project will benefit both the students and the university. We decided to make the project in Django because it’s a technology we know how to work with (We are learning along the way from Django docs and other resources such as books). We got stuck thinking about whether Django would be the best choice for this type of project. Also we are struggling with the data model. Specifically, how to represent nested comments in the database schema.
If you can provide some general guidance and advice, I will be very grateful.
Also, It’s my first time in the forum. Hi everyone! 
I’d first recommend that you and your friends get real clear and specific as to what your objectives really are here.
Are you doing this to provide a service, or are you doing this to learn Django?
If your underlying objective is to provide this service, then no, I would actually recommend against trying to build something. I’d be looking for preexisting solutions in the Open Source world. There are plenty of choices out there.
On the other hand, if what you’re really trying to do is learn Django, and this is just the vehicle you’re using to do that, then “rock on”.
This actually is a non-trivial issue, with many possible implications and potential effects on the performance and operation of your system. Some of that includes figuring out how you’re planning to display these “nested” comments and how deep you’re going to allow the nesting to get.
Since you’re just starting out with this, I’d strongly recommend you don’t try to implement that at first. Get your basic system up and running first, and then if you still consider it necessary, migrate to a structure supporting that.
Start small. If this is your first “real” Django project, don’t try to do everything all at once. Identify a minimally functional product and get that done first.
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Django sounds like a perfectly sensible choice for this, especially since you already know a bit of it. I wouldn’t overthink whether another framework is technically better. A forum is a good project for learning Django because you’ll end up dealing with users, permissions, posts, moderation and a fair amount of database work.
For the comments, I’d keep it simple at first and use a self-referencing foreign key. So each comment has an optional parent pointing to another comment. That handles replies without making the database model too complicated. You can always limit the depth later if deeply nested threads start becoming awkward to display.
I’d also suggest building the basic version first and seeing what your university users actually want before adding lots of features. Things like event attendance might come up later too, and there are simple tools for an attendance calculator if you need one. 