Alumni Finder

The Alumni Finder is a web-based platform that focuses on involving UMD Students to access alumni-related information and resources.

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Inspiration

As undergraduate students at the University of Maryland, we all shared a collective desire for more guidance in navigating academics and entering the workforce in our respective areas of study. This inspired our project idea, and we aimed to assist fellow students in finding support through our website, Alumni Finder.

What it does

Alumni Finder is a website exclusively available to UMD students, providing them with alumni-related information and resources to help them excel in academia and their careers through opportunities or mentorships.

How we built it

The website is built using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end code and display. The backend code utilizes different APIs and JS to create a filter to search for particular alumni.

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges, including issues with visibility and file connection on the server. There were difficulties inserting images into the website, but these were quickly resolved. Another problem was figuring out how to separate CSS and HTML into distinct files. Additionally, implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) for UMD accounts posed challenges, so it was not implemented in this prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team achieved many milestones over the past three weeks. Figma mockups were created swiftly, enabling us to fully code the frontend of the website. The Alumni page of our website allows students to filter through alumni based on their area of study or name. The website is mostly fully functional, and we did not encounter any timing issues.

What we learned

Over the past three weeks, we learned many things about building a project and working within a team. We discovered that creating a project requires teamwork, and effective communication within our team prevented timing issues. Documenting our progress helped us stay on the same page and work more effectively towards building an end product. Lastly, we became more comfortable using different software and coding languages such as GitHub, VS Code, Figma, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

What's next for Alumni Finder

In the future, we hope to implement improvements for Alumni Finder, including user login and profile creation/editing through UMD SSO. Finalizing the chat feature to enable fully functional message sending and receiving is another goal. Lastly, we aspire to add more features, such as company-specific interview preparation to better equip students for internships/post-grad jobs, and resume reviews.

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