Career Buddy

The chatbot on messenger in the desktop version
The chatbot on messenger in the Android version
The chatbot on messenger in the iOS version

What really inspired us to do this project was how overwhelming it can be to choose a college and what subjects we’d like to study.

As final year students in University, we faced the struggle of choosing a college that suits our requirements and abilities perfectly and we wished there was some easier way than browsing hundreds of sites or paying for a counselor. Every year millions of students face this dilemma and we wanted to make it easier for them(and also fun!).

Most students after finishing their grade 10 or after Pre-University(PU) education have a challenge of choosing a new place of study for the next two years or four years and usually aren't satisfied with the one they picked and they don't have any other choice but to complain about it or regret the place that they choose much later on.

There are a lot of colleges that are ranked well but that doesn't necessarily reflect their actual quality and the system used to rank them might be faulty and biased towards colleges possessing certain indicators and hence colleges with more money to spend on advertising etc. might deprive other colleges that are in reality better than them. Therefore we believe in a more personalized approach to this process that would students feel at home with selecting a college of their choice.

Some people around us generally complain about how they ended up in the wrong stream as they did not have proper guidance at that critical stage of their lives when they needed to make those important decisions. They feel they could have fared better in a field that they were actually interested in. A large majority feel if they had chosen a different field, they could have performed better. We wanted to provide a solution for this to help future generations. They should be well aware of their options and opportunities before choosing a field.

In India, most people are from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Most of the time they are the first ones in their families to get a formal education. They do not have access to career counselling nor do they have good exposure to the industry. We want to help society to choose the field best suited for them.

What it does

Our chatbot provides information on the best ranked Pre-University and Universities using filters like location and subjects.

In the Indian education system, we have to do a Pre-University course in three possible streams- Science(Physics, Chemistry, Math and an elective), Commerce(Economics, Business Studies, Accountancy and an elective) and Arts(History, Geography, Political Science) of two years after 10th grade(similar to 11th and 12th grade). In every city, there are innumerable colleges that offer this course and being in a large city like Bangalore it can be hard to choose the right course in the right college for many students, this is the aspect that our chatbot focuses on helping students with, we provide area-wise solutions. We show the top ranked Pre-University College(and all its details) for their preferred subjects in the specific location they choose.

For suggesting a University after graduating from Pre-University, we suggest colleges from various fields as well as from their choice of city in India.

How we built it

We have used Python and the Flask framework as the back-end and also SQLite3 for the databases. We have also employed Chatfuel for messenger integration. Localtunnel and Ngrok are used for deploying it.

Challenges we ran into

Being beginners in Python and having never worked with Flask, understanding it took a while.

We were confused about what platform to use, and went through several different ones like Wit.ai, Chatfuel and Integromat, Manychat, Chatterbot, etc before finally deciding what would be best to suit our existing skillset. Most chatbots were made with JavaScript, a language no one in our team knew, hence we decided to use Python.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy to have successfully deployed this bot and made it as personable as we could.

This hackathon gave us experience in new fields we had not explored before and made significant progress in them. We also learnt how powerful messenger is, and how many more apps we can deploy on it using Facebook apps to leverage them for our applications.

What we learned

Participating in this hackathon has given us a lot to learn and explore such as becoming better at Python, learning a new framework (Flask), Database Management and integrating it with Python. How to deploy an app onto Facebook Messenger as well as the extensive features Facebook provides for developers.

What's next for Career Buddy

We wish to make it even more generic so that it may be applied to a bigger pool of people, so that everyone can be use it.

We also look forward to help aspirants find their fields of interest by asking them a couple of Yes or No questions. Depending on that, our chatbot can suggest customized career options that are more suitable for the user. This will help them make the right choice for their future and give them good exposure.