Solis

A safe space to connect.

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Inspiration

Gender disparity in STEM fields has been widely recognized, but few initiatives have been established at a younger age when girls decide what they want to pursue. We aim to empower and inspire girls by offering a platform to connect with fellow women in STEM.

What it does

Solis is a platform for woman-aligned individuals interested in STEM to connect with each other. It's a friendly and casual networking app where students can feel comfortable finding mock interview partners, hackathon team members and just to share experiences and advice with each other.

How we built it

We made a prototype in Figma and built the frontend using React Native and Expo.

For the backend, we used MongoDB Atlas to store user data, and wrote scripts to handle saving and fetching data from the database in Java.

Challenges we ran into

In the front end, it was our first time working with React Native so we inevitably ran into a couple walls debugging our code. We had some trouble with displaying icons properly and running the app on different devices.

For the backend, we also wanted to use something new and decided to use MongoDB Atlas. This proved to be very different from databases we've dealt with in the past, and it took a lot of work and time to integrate it with React-Native and Java.

We didn't manage to put everything together in time, but all the same, we're proud of what we managed to achieve on each end of the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Three of us are first time hackers, and it's our first time working together! We definitely learned a lot this weekend, from working with new tech to writing a good pitch.

Next Steps

We'd love to widen our target audience from just university students to all woman-aligned in the field of STEM and feature more events, talks and workshops from women breaking the STEM gap stereotypes.

To reach out to a greater audience we would also like to expand globally and make Solis more accessible in different language and countries!

On the technical side, it would be great to improve our matching algorithm for connection recommendations between users.

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