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Motivation

Tertiary students are constantly bombarded with information across various platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, email newsletters, Telegram groups, and more. Hidden within this clutter are valuable academic opportunities like hackathons, workshops, networking events, and competitions.

However, because these opportunities are spread across different channels with no central access point, many students miss out. This may be because they are unsure of where to search or overlook the application deadline. The high barrier to access discourages even the most curious learners.

The Idea

Acadiverse was born out of a desire to empower students to take ownership of their personal and academic development. We envisioned a centralized, user-friendly platform that bridges the gap between opportunity and access.

Our goal

To create a one-stop hub where students can easily find and register for academic events tailored to their interests, skill levels, and availability.

Features

1. Manual Listing of Events

Allows organisations to publicise academic events which are not on our web app
Verification of the legitimacy through manual checks

2. Auto web scraping

Allows web scrapers to discover academic programs, eliminating the need for frequent manual updates.

3. Summarised information for events

Provides critical information for the event at a glance (e.g. commitment dates and times, registration details)

4. Recommendations:

Users can customise filters and preferences to look for events they are interested in

Target Audience

Our primary users are tertiary students (university and polytechnic level) who are:

Proactive about their learning journeys
Seeking extracurricular academic experiences
Unsure where to look or overwhelmed by scattered sources

Impact

With Acadiverse, students won’t need to scroll endlessly on social media or dig through cluttered inboxes. They’ll be able to focus more on growing, learning, and participating rather than just spending hours researching for the opportunities themselves.

Vision

We envision Acadiverse becoming the chosen one-stop platform for tertiary students to search for opportunities. In the long run, we aim to collaborate with schools and opportunity organisers to streamline sign-ups on Acadiverse. This means that students would be able to directly sign up on Acadiverse and have a dashboard to review their current priorities and projects. Eventually, we want to create a thriving ecosystem of motivated, passionate and engaged learners.

Our learnings

Throughout this project, we've learned the importance of user-centered design and the power of automation in solving real-world problems. We discovered that successful platforms require both robust technical infrastructure and intuitive user experience. Our team also gained valuable insights into web scraping technologies, database management, and the complexities of data verification and categorization.

1. Design

Through this experience, we learnt that no design is perfect. Software engineering is about choices and trade-offs. For instance, when choosing between relational and non-relational databases, we need to consider the need for structure or flexibility of our data schema. Besides, when designing the asset / file upload management system, we trade-off convenience (merely storing assets in the rows of the database) for speed and consistency (having separate mapping to link between events and assets).

2. Security

We learnt that it is important to ensure the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) triad of our data, via proper access controls and other security measures. This means adopting security principles like minimal privilege access, which means only giving users the bare minimum privilege that they need to perform their tasks to keep data confidential to those who have access to it only. We achieve this via the use of JWT (JSON Web Token) for authentication. We also strive to ensure data integrity by validating request bodies that create, update or delete any data from our database. Of course, we concede that our application is not bulletproof as there are infinitely many attack vectors that an attacker may exploit. However, we provide sufficient security measures that would deter most common attacks out there. Ultimately, it is about how much risk we could afford and how secure we want our system to be.

3. Webscraping

As none of our members have experience in webscraping, we had to dive straight in and pick up the skills through simply coding. With the help of our mentor, our eyes were opened to libraries like BeautifulSoup, as well as searching for HTML elements using classes and Xpath. Along the way, we discovered the complexities and issues relating to inconsistencies and decided to integrate API calling to Gemini to better improve the data we had collected from webscraping, ultimately creating a more complete and useful data for our website.