High School to College Helper for First-Gen Low-Income Students
Pitch and Demo: https://youtu.be/soOoCVbMh28
Only 26% adults ages 22 to 59 who do not have a college-educated parent have completed a bachelor's degree themselves (Pew Research). This is an incredibly low number, especially when compared with the 70% of adults who have a college-educated parent and have completed a bachelor's degree.
Moreover, a group of 21 students was removed from the USA within a single day due to visa inconsistencies. In Canada, an alarming situation unfolds as 700 international students confront potential deportation stemming from fraudulent admission documents.
These unfortunate scenarios highlight the reality of students who lack the necessary expertise in the application process.
These disheartening occurrences breed insecurity among first generation low income students and international students. In response, we have developed a comprehensive solution poised to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.
PathMyWay serves as an inclusive platform, connecting prospective students, whether from international, domestic, first generation, or low income backgrounds, with peers already pursuing their desired majors in universities. These mentors, hailing from the same university, will expertly guide students through the application process and financial aid intricacies.
Moreover, our platform presents a wealth of opportunities through monthly updated scholarships. Students can effortlessly filter scholarships based on their demographics and chosen majors, aligning their educational aspirations with financial support.
Additionally, our deadline calendar ensures no opportunity is missed, keeping students informed about the application deadlines of their desired universities.
In addition, our platform offers a resume helper. This tool benefits both university representatives and students by meticulously checking for weak action words and even goes so far to suggest stronger alternatives, ensuring a more polished application.
The website is build through HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The mentorship search input boxes store information, and when the buttons are clicked, the information is fed through JavaScript code in order to give the user the desired results. The resume helper breaks down a txt file word by word and recognizes weak words, and suggests replacements for stronger words. The scholarship filtering and application deadline portions search through a set list of scholarships or universities and displays those that match the search item, case insensitive. The design elements are made in HTML, and the filtering, searching, and sorting is done through JavaScript.
Undoubtedly, time posed a significant challenge as we ambitiously tackled everything within a mere two days. An additional complication emerged from a team member residing in a different timezone. However, despite these obstacles, we stand here today with our project, a testament to our collective perseverance and the hurdles we triumphantly overcame. For one of our team members who spearheaded the back-end portion, it was their first time ever coding in JavaScript.
We take pride in the invaluable lessons we've gleaned, the hurdles we've overcome, and our remarkable feat of crafting something meaningful within a limited timeframe. For a few team members, this marked their inaugural foray into hackathon dynamics, making them acclimate to the format. We are proud to have created something functional with little to no prior knowledge on skills such as HTML or JavaScript.
Engaging in this endeavor has been an enlightening and transformative journey for our team. The workshops we participated in have not only provided us with great knowledge, they broadened our horizons but have also instilled within us a deeper sense of purpose within our team. As we move forward, we're fueled by the inspiration we gained, propelling us to wholeheartedly embrace the future of this project. We have also learned the importance of teamwork, delegation, and communication, which is extremely necessary when doing a project where you cannot physically see your teammates.
Continuing our commitment to accessibility, we're diligently working on crafting an app. This strategic move is aimed at facilitating smooth interaction and engagement, guaranteeing a seamless user experience for everyone involved.
More specific steps include expanding our database of universities and scholarships and modifying the resume builder to intake file types other than txt.
In addition, we're gearing up to collaborate with college representatives across the globe, including Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. This visionary step is set to elevate student engagement, fostering meaningful connections with their desired universities.
You will start on the home page. Navigate to our Mission page to see our mission, and if you have any suggestions or want to get in touch, please navigate to our Contact page! Our project has four main features, please navigate to the Features page to use them.
- Mentorship program: If you are a mentor, please fill out the form to enter yourself as a mentor, then click the "Become a mentor" button. If you are seeking mentorship, please search for a mentor by inputting a university and a department (case insensitive). Click the "Search for a mentor" button to find mentors that match your university and/or department.
- Scholarship Filtering: If you would like to filter through our database of scholarships, please enter some keywords in the "Filter scholarships..." box, such as "international" or "domestic" or "female" in order to refine your search of scholarships to ones that will meet your specific needs or demographics.
- Application Deadlines: If you would like to see the various deadlines for a certain school, please enter the name of the school in the "Filter deadlines by college..." box, such as "Cornell" or "MIT". This will refine your search to only show the college deadlines that you would like. If you would like to refine your search by something different, such as "FAFSA" if you want to see all FAFSA deadlines, not school specific, you can do that as well.
- Resume Helper: Please transfer your resume to a .txt file, as Word Documents or PDFs have formatting characters that make it hard to read. Then upload your document, and our website will give you some suggestions for some weak words that you can change. The website will also give some suggestions on stronger words.
We have used the pages feature of GitHub. You can navigate to https://ananyabhatia.github.io/PathMyWay in order to see our prototype. No download or setup needed, just click on the link.
Technologies and tools used are VS Code, ChatGPT, and GeeksForGeeks for coding/hypothetical data generation. Data such as scholarship lists and mentors are purely fictional and hypothetical for this situation.
