MentorMatchy

Empowering women in pursuit of their career dreams ...

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Inspiration

Although more women are entering formally male-dominated fields, it’s still difficult as ever to find success as a female professional. Mentorship provides an opportunity for aspiring women professionals to connect with eminent and established women and get guidance as they pursue their career goals.

What it does

MentorMatchy is a platform for aspiring female professionals and established women alike to make connections that fit their unique career goals and work styles. Filling out a brief form redirects users to their top matches.

We developed our own algorithm to match mentors and mentees, using a combination of basic identifying information, industry categories, and personality traits/work styles. These traits are then given their own weight and ability to prioritize a certain trait dependent on user responses. All matches are given similarity scores and recommended on a least-difference basis.

How we built it

Our frontend was built with React, TypeScript, and Bootstrap CSS. We used PostGRESQL and CockroachDB in order to create and host our database. A custom API using Flask with built to interact with the database from the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was carrying over information between webpages using states in React, as it was a mostly new concept to us. Additionally, then learning how to use those states in order to connect the backend to the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of all the new frameworks we learned over the course of this hackathon; Flask and much of React were completely new to us. Getting the frontend to successfully send POST requests to our API from a form and properly display information from various GET requests was also a big success. We're also really happy with the homepage design and the animations.

What we learned

We learned most of the frameworks for this project on the spot and gained a greater understanding of how a full-stack application is built with the front and back end.

What's next for MentorMatchy

Ideally, we'd implement a feature to display all the possible mentors and mentees for users to view. It allows mentees to view other mentors in various fields that they can explore. We would also use AWS3 in order to successfully hold images uploaded by users. We'd also revamp our current matching algorithm to be more scalable for a larger database.

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