What inspired us?
Throughout our careers as computer science majors and trying to gain experience in the industry over the past few years, we became aware of the significant lack of representation for diverse individuals. From a recent conversation speaking to a professional, we realized they felt the same in a large way. We recognized that traditional networking platforms often miss the personal touch and tailored support. Through that, BranchOut was born. We envisioned a space that not only connects individuals with experienced mentors and research collaborators but also celebrates their individual journeys and achievements.
What it does
BranchOut is a community-driven website linking industry mentors, researchers, and aspiring professionals through mentorship, research collaboration, and daily Q&A prompts—fostering authentic, career-growing connections.
How we built it
We started out our designs on paper and then moved to a more detailed, digital user-centric wireframe to map out the key functionalities including mentorship matching, research collaboration, and a community Q&A. The front-end development included using HTML and CSS while the back-end consisted of JavaScript, Python, and dummy data which we plan to move to real-time data in the future.
Challenges we ran into
The initial challenge we ran into was deciding which frameworks to use and what web-based application to build. Another major challenge was figuring out how to implement D3, luckily a mentor provided a lot of support and helped us to integrate a multiple frameworks and languages into one cohesive project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of our main accomplishments as a group definitely involves being able to seamlessly blend our conceptual ideas into a tangible user-friendly platform. Some of our personal accomplishments include building a clean design on our front-end for a responsive website that uses an mentorship matching system with filters as well as a research submission portal that we were able to allow to match researchers with similar keywords.
What we learned
We learnt how to extensively integrate multiple languages and frameworks as well as how to deal with event handling. The process taught us that some setbacks can take hours, but in the long run, it improves functionality and efficiency majorly making it worth it.
What's next for BranchOut: An Academic Community
We plan to continue scaling the website to a much more integrated and interactive design where users are able to filter through demographics to find their mentors, feel comfortable in their conversations, and researchers can receive real-time data on which areas of their research are the most relevant to other users and connect based on such metrics, similar to the LitMaps website design.
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