Townsend

Townsend is a mobile application created to help underprivileged students in applying to college and receiving mentorship.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for the app comes from two different life experiences from our team. From Manas's experience as international students, he understood deeply the necessity of staying up to date with requirements such as the student visa process, additional standardized testing, and more thorough online college research needs. He came to the conclusion that there was a definitive need to pool all college-bound resources into an all-in-one-solution.

The other life experience inspiration stems from Chris' upbringings in Houston, Texas, one of the fastest growing cities and increasingly one of the hardest hit metropolitan areas for poverty in the United States. Chris, along with a couple family members, realized that his friends from school didn't consider going to college due to either self-doubt, lack of knowledge about the process, or a combination of both. Chris ended up helping his teammates get into four-year universities by assisting in their process, but when the three teammates together, they knew they could help many more change their lives for the better.

What it does

townsend is a mobile app solution, for iOS and Android, that offers 100% free college resources, access to mentorship programs, and an optimized Timeline that will tell the student what is next in their college journey. In addition, students can view schools that fit their academic, financial, and social needs in their "perfect match" University, using a scoring system to make school recommendations to the students. In this portal, students can find links that direct to the University website in order to receive more information on the school.

College recruiters, Admission Counselors, and any other staff member related to University Admissions can register their school into our Firebase solution to begin having their school appear to potential freshmen. Additionally, college representatives can access a portal where they can filter students by various criteria and email the students directly or port the email direct to their admissions mailing lists. These faculty can also serve as mentors for students and content creators for the resources in exchange for preferred spacings on student school searches, creating a self sustaining ecosystem benefiting student education and University recruitment.

The Timeline feature takes into consideration three factors: classification, current grade point average, and current progression versus a determined best-case preset progression. Taking in this information, townsend will notify the student of the next steps in order to be acceptance ready. For example, if the student has a low GPA, townsend will recommend resources for studying tips, information on raising GPA, and little words of motivation from mentors or from the automated system.

How we built it

We built the current build by using Flutter to develop for both iOS and Android. Manas used Firebase to build the backend.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we ran into was we had a teammate drop out late Saturday before he could help work on development due to a family emergency, switching all three of us to Full Stack rather than having two Front End and two Back End Developers. This put a huge strain on the ability to reach target UX and target feature support before the deadline.

The second challenge came from the fact we only had one previously experienced Flutter developer on our team, being Manas. This caused a signifigant amount of time being spent on two-thirds of our team learning the language on the fly as they programmed. Lastly, the time spent on researching APIs and Developer Guides on an already short-staff cut down on time to implement the features we wanted and have extremely thorough testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While there were more roadbumps along the way, we are proud of many aspects of our work this weekend. First, it was everyone's first Hackathon, and all three of us were able to get valuable experience, make valuable connections in the industry, and make some new friends along the way.

While it was a challenge, we had two members learn Flutter for the first time in their lives and were able to build a project within the first couple hours of learning the syntax. We were able to put together a wonderful presentation on something we believe could be a great source for making millions worldwide have a better future with our app as compared to without; As for Kimly and Chris, they are excited about the future their Flutter education this weekend can take them through townsend and through various personal projects.

What we learned

We learned that its much easier to start small and continue building on top of our ideas, ensuring stable builds along the way. Additionally, we learned the importance of asking for help from mentors and our teammates as we saw more progress when we did not take on challenges by ourselves. Lastly, Manas was able to practice his mentorship skills by helping Chris and Kimly, and Chris and Kimly were able to learn a whole new language this weekend. All round, ShellHacks was a success for the townsend team.

What's next for townsend

townsend will continue to be a personal project for our team. We need to analyse what worked in our build this weekend, what did not, and how to grow the app into what we all know it can become. Higher education should not be barred to a select few, and with townsend, higher education will be attainable by all young people all across the world.

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