Beacon

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Road Maps

Inspiration

In cities like Toronto and across North America, many Black students grow up seeing only a few visible paths to success often limited to sports, music, or the careers immediately around them. While these pathways are powerful in their own right, our platform expands that visibility.

What it does

We use AI to analyze a student’s interests, strengths, preferences, and even their resume to generate a structured, personalized roadmap toward real, attainable career paths.

How we built it

We built a full-stack web application using React on the frontend and Node.js with Supabase on the backend. We designed a relational database to manage users, exploration sessions, roadmaps, and progress tracking. We integrated Azure OpenAI to generate personalized career roadmaps based on user inputs and resumes.

Finally, we attempted connected to the XRP Ledger to create optional proof badges for milestone completion, giving users a verifiable record of their achievements.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was structuring the AI prompts to consistently return detailed, multi-layer roadmaps in valid JSON format. We also had to carefully design how roadmap progress would be stored and updated, since the roadmap is saved as nested JSON.

Integrating XRPL was another challenge, especially handling wallet setup, transaction signing, and ensuring we were using the testnet properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we built a system that generates structured, realistic career roadmaps instead of generic advice. We successfully integrated AI with resume analysis to personalize starting points.

What we learned

We learned how important prompt design is when working with AI systems we realized that structure and constraints matter a lot. We also experimented with a new styling framework with Bulma CSS.

What's next for Beacon

Next, we want to expand Beacon from roadmap generation to real-world opportunity integration. That includes building a live scholarship and internship discovery engine, strengthening resume feedback with deeper AI analysis, and refining roadmap personalization using user progress data.

We also plan to enhance the XRPL proof system into portable micro-credentials that users can share directly with recruiters or mentors.