Career Focus Recommendation App

Inspiration

Several of our team members have struggled with choosing the right major or electives. Sometimes we were unsure which path was right for us, and sometimes we didn't even know that it existed!

What it does

Our app takes information about the character traits of professionals in different tech fields and recommends those fields to the user based on how close the user's characteristics match those of people actually working in that field. In the future, it could be subsidized by sharing the information with colleges and universities that want to recruit students into programs for specific fields.

How we built it

Dan was integral to getting this done! He facilitated a brainstorming process and helped us refine ideas and divide up tasks. He also made our lovely PowerPoint, which you will see later.
Alex wrote a mock matching algorithm based on statistical analysis of a theoretical population of professionals in each field.
Lucian was responsible for the GUI and integrating the results of the matching algorithm. They were working right up to the last minute.
Nathan was responsible for compiling our files into something useful, as well as sourcing libraries and packages and providing coding support to the rest of us. He also created the function maps shown in the PowerPoint.

Challenges we ran into

We didn't have real numbers for, well, pretty much anything. We had to invent what we thought were reasonable average scores for professionals in each field, and we don't actually have the quiz that generates those scores - we just modeled ours after one that exists - so we had to invent a user's potential scores as well.
Additionally, we didn't have time to train a machine learning algorithm, especially on a nonexistent dataset, so our matching algorithm is perhaps not as accurate as it could be in a real-world application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

"Not crying" - Lucian
"Making all my files compile without a million errors" - Alex
"Overcoming the challenge of using new tools" - Dan
"Learning to use the package manager vcpkg" - Nathan

What we learned

Some technologies we learned include vcpkg, wxWidgets, and a deeper knowledge of c++.
Some skills we learned are how to have a really good brainstorm session and how to communicate effectively with one another about the project.

What's next for the Career Focus Recommendation App

If this were to be a fully realized application, a few things would need to be added to it:
A quiz to determine important characteristics would either need to be created or the license to use it acquired from an existing version.
Real sample data from actual people in the fields of interest taking that quiz would need to be gathered.
A machine learning program would be used instead of the statistics-based matching program.
Potentially, the results could be shared with colleges and universities who want to attract students to their specialization programs. This would enable us to subsidize the app and keep it completely free for student users.

Built With

• c++
• nlohmannjsonparser
• vcpkg
• wxwidgets