Wom[IN] | Devpost

Inspiration ✨

One of the biggest challenges women+ face is building up the courage to break into STEM. We believe that the most valuable resource one could offer is mentorship and the ability to develop a network of like-minded individuals as well as key resources. Current general resources available to all individuals include mock interview platforms, social media networking applications, and various online conferences.

However, we wanted to create an all-in-one web application that specifically connects and encourages women+ to break into STEM together. As a group of women+ in STEM, we know how daunting the path of STEM can be so our goal was to create a safe and comfortable platform specifically for women+! Our web application connects female and non-binary mentors and mentees through a matching algorithm, enables women+ to share interview experiences and includes a personal dashboard to track current job applications to help mentees kickstart their careers.

What it does 🤔

Wom[IN] has 3 main features:

Network Recommendations. Our platform is designed to pair female and non-binary mentors and mentees with each other based off of similar interests, past experiences and current interests. Being surrounded by like-minded successful individuals is key to success as learning from them would be invaluable.
Company Reviews. We also wanted to integrate a company review feature into our application. We wanted a user to be able to search by company and find a list of other user testimonials regarding the interview process (number of rounds, interview nature (technical/behavioural/OA), useful resources & topics to study).
Personal Job Dashboard. This feature would give the user the ability to track which companies they submitted an application for, the stage of the process, etc. Ideally, we would have been able to add a feature function for better usability.

How we built it ⚒️

Our application was built using a React frontend and Node.js + Express.js backend. We also setup a login and authentication feature and stored this user information and job application information into a MongoDB database. We also registered the domain womin.tech to host our project in the future!

Challenges we ran into 🕵️‍♀️

We encountered several challenges when it came to the interactions between the frontend and backend. These were typically resolved through group calls and the internet! There were also some minor styling errors on the frontend which we hope to resolve in the future. Finally, our initial web application idea was quite ambitious; we planned on developing many features. We realized that this was not feasible about halfway through so we narrowed our scope to focus on the most important ones.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 💡

Throughout the hackathon, our team was able to maintain very consistent communication and we were all supportive of one another. From the planning to the execution, things flowed relatively smoothly due to the encouraging and helpful environment. We would frequently hop in calls to discuss which stages we were at and offer help to team members who were behind schedule. We are proud to have made a functional app as we were able to learn a lot about the frontend and backend processes and how they link together. We all worked on a little bit of everything and definitely expanded our skillsets this hackathon!

What's next for Wom[IN]

Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
User interface improvements, refine current features, construct a more advanced matching algorithm (interests, desired results etc.).
Add new features such as a mock interview/coffee chat scheduler (availability, company, behavioural/technical), messaging feature.
Develop customized user profiles complete with application, interview and network suggestions.
Integrate or scrape data from other applications such as LinkedIn, Zoom, Gmail etc.