RESOURCESfirst

RESOURCESfirst serves as a comprehensive hub that consolidates all the departments, offices, people, and organizations within each CUNY college into a single, easy-to-navigate platform.

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RESOURCESfirst

The CUNY system is home to an incredible range of resources that can significantly impact the lives and academic success of its students. However, these resources are often dispersed across multiple websites, leading to confusion and missed opportunities for those who need them the most. This fragmentation results in many students struggling to find the support they need, whether it’s financial aid, mental health services, academic guidance, or career development.

Introducing RESOURCESfirst—a unified hub designed to consolidate all resources provided by CUNY colleges into one easily accessible platform. By integrating RESOURCESfirst with CUNYfirst, we leverage the traffic of the existing platform to ensure that every student can quickly find and take full advantage of the opportunities available to them, regardless of their campus or situation.

With RESOURCESfirst, we eliminate the barriers caused by scattered information, creating a streamlined, user-friendly experience that puts the resources students need right at their fingertips. This integration will not only enhance the accessibility of essential services but also empower students to achieve their academic and personal goals with greater ease and confidence.

Let’s make sure no student misses out on the support they deserve—by bringing everything they need into one central, accessible location with RESOURCESfirst.

Inspiration

As a group of CUNY students, we’ve all faced the frustration of searching for critical resources on CUNYfirst when we needed them most, only to be met with scattered information across multiple websites. This experience highlighted a major gap in resource accessibility that affects thousands of students, leading to missed opportunities and added stress. We realized that improving this aspect could significantly benefit the entire student body by minimizing outreach challenges and making essential services more accessible when they’re needed most.

What it Does

RESOURCESfirst serves as a comprehensive hub that consolidates all the departments, offices, people, and organizations within each CUNY college into a single, easy-to-navigate platform. To further enhance the user experience, we’ve integrated a chatbot designed to swiftly answer questions and redirect users to the specific department or resource they need. This tool ensures that students can find the right information without getting lost in a maze of web pages.

How We Built It

We built RESOURCESfirst using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, ensuring a clean and responsive design. To power the chatbot, we leveraged OpenRouter, an AI Chat API, which enables real-time interaction and provides users with quick, accurate responses. The combination of these technologies allowed us to create a dynamic and user-friendly platform that meets the needs of CUNY students. Challenges We Ran Into One of the biggest challenges we faced was the limited time available for development. This constraint prevented us from implementing some of the advanced features we initially envisioned for RESOURCESfirst. Despite this, we were able to create a functional and valuable tool, but we know that with more time, we could have expanded its capabilities even further.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

We are incredibly proud of the design, structure, and overall complexity of RESOURCESfirst. Our team worked diligently to ensure that the website is not only visually appealing but also intuitive and efficient. The successful integration of the chatbot and the organization of resources into a single platform are achievements that we believe will have a lasting positive impact on the CUNY community.

What We Learned

Throughout this project, we learned the importance of collaboration, communication, and planning when working as a team. From the initial ideation phase to the final stages of development, we gained valuable insights into how to effectively execute a project of this scale. This experience has also deepened our understanding of the end-to-end process of bringing an idea to life through careful planning, teamwork, and technical execution.

What’s Next for RESOURCESfirst

Our vision for RESOURCESfirst extends beyond its current form. We aim to expand the platform’s services to include all CUNY colleges, creating a truly comprehensive resource hub for the entire CUNY system. Additionally, we plan to enhance the chatbot’s functionality by implementing frameworks like LlamaIndex or LangChain, which will enable the AI to provide more personalized and precise responses. Ultimately, we would love for RESOURCESfirst to become an official service within CUNYfirst, seamlessly integrated to serve the entire student body. We see RESOURCESfirst as a stepping stone toward that goal, laying the foundation for a more connected and accessible CUNY experience for all.

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