Please Help Me Network

Struggle with networking? Yeah, we do too. What if you could map out all your potential connections locally during events and find people who are interested in things that you are doing?

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Inspiration

Both of us struggle hard with networking. In the current climate, where there are thousands of bright and capable students looking for jobs at the same time, it's hard to get noticed in a sea of cold opens or same font same layout resumes. To network requires authenticity, personal (ideally shared) experiences, and mutual interest in what the other can offer. We often run into self-doubt and shyness when thinking about who to contact, not wanting to come off as inauthentic or only in it for personal gain. Surely we weren't the only people like that either - not everyone is suited to socializing and extroversion, and that puts people who are introverted, or of a marginalized identity, at a disadvantage. We wanted a way to make networking feel more organic, and for more attempts to lead to genuine connections.

What it does

Users can create a profile with information about them, some of which will be visible and some not. Then, they can see the overarching user map where users are placed as nodes on a map. Similar users will be linked together. The idea is that for each event, there will be a unique map with all the people in that event, and you can find people to net work with by finding the people that are closest to you on the map, factoring in your interests, skills, personalities and demographics. Students can network with peers and recruiters, and recruiters can display questions or "I'm interested in" information to attract candidates they might want, and also see other candidates similar to previous candidates that performed well.

How we built it

We used Angular and d3 for user visualization on the front end and FastAPI and Auth0 for backend/user creation, and additional Python packages to support these frameworks.

Challenges we ran into

In general, only one of the members knew web development with Angular, which was the main framework for this project, so lots of time was spent learning from scratch. We had an issue with implementing Auth0 into our project in the beginning, but after a mysterious fix that we still don't know what happened, it worked! We also couldn't work as many hours as we wanted to because one of the members didn't feel well for a couple hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Every hackathon, we tend to focus on backend and functionality over design and frontend work. We are always quite satisfied by features that fully work as intended, because a lot of code went into them - so our fully fledged user authentication and creation system was a big accomplishment for us!

What we learned

How to use the frameworks listed above to create a web app

What's next for Please Help Me Network

Originally, there were plans for algorithms to tie similar uses together with NLP - that would be the next step to look into, so adding some cloud computing aspects to it.

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