Ahoy Scholar

Every year over $100 million in scholarship prizes go unclaimed. Ahoy Scholars aims to help students take advantage of opportunities like these with our Scholarship Efficiency Optimization Engine.

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Inspiration

We have seen people in our own community applying to many hundreds of scholarships with the hope that they could take advantage of the millions of unrealized scholarship potential, so that they too can attend their dream institutions.

What it does

Allows students to spend a fraction of the time appluying for scholarships by giving a scholarship index, a score from 1-10 that determines how worthwhile any scholarship is.

How we built it

We created a formula that considerers three attributes of a scholarship: the website traffic, essay word count, and amount of prize money. For getting website traffic data we used an open source api of internet data, the less traffic the better. For considering essay word count we have an ideal word count of 500 (enough to deter others with out detering user), the farther a scholarship deviates the lower it's score. For the amount of prize money, the more the marrier. This formula then returns a value from 1 to 10 with 10 being the perfect scholarship and 0 being a highly competetive scholarship.

Challenges we ran into

Comming up with quantitative indicators of untouched scholarships was quite difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing that we were most proud of was that we were able to create a scaleable optimization engine that takes in parameters to determine how effective scholarships could be. Another thing that we're proud of is our use of strictly publicly availible data, so that this application can be accessible to all people without any added cost.

What we learned

It is not ideal to spend too much time fixating on any one point of a project. We learned that its far more useful to focus on the project as a whole and get to our MVP before making fine adjustments.

What's next for AhoyScholar

As we have included in our slideshow, we have many ideas for future iterations of Ahoy Scholar. Some of these include creating our own website traffic estimation tool, incorporating student specific attributes like GPA and SAT, utilizing a web scrapper to remove the need for manual data entry.

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