Career_Verse

Inspiration

A lot of students pick a career off a vague description or family pressure, with no real sense of what the day-to-day actually feels like. We wanted a way to let someone try on a career before committing years to it — not a quiz, an actual lived scenario.

What it does

CareerVerse lets you pick a career (Software Engineer, Doctor, Lawyer, UI/UX Designer, Data Analyst, Digital Marketer), then drops you into a realistic first day guided by an AI acting as your mentor. You work through a real scenario in conversation — a production outage, an ambiguous patient, a messy client case — over five turns. At the end, you get a scored Career DNA report: strengths, areas to improve, a five-trait profile (analytical thinking, communication, creativity, leadership, adaptability), and recommended skills and related careers. The whole experience runs in English, Spanish, French, or Igbo.

How we built it

The client is React + Vite + Tailwind CSS with React Router. The server is Node.js + Express, holding the Anthropic API key server-side and exposing three endpoints: start a simulation, continue it, and evaluate the finished transcript into structured JSON. The evaluation prompt forces a strict JSON schema so the frontend can render real score cards and progress bars instead of parsing free text.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the AI mentor in character while still gradually increasing difficulty took several rounds of prompt tuning. We also had to build real error handling for API rate limits — early on, a failed request would silently show a blank chat bubble instead of telling the user what happened, so we added typed errors with inline retry instead of failing silently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A fully working end-to-end loop — pick a career, live the scenario, get a real scored report — running in four languages, with a genuinely original "Career DNA" output instead of a plain pass/fail score.

What we learned

How much prompt engineering it takes to keep an LLM in a consistent persona across multiple turns while also holding back the evaluation until the very end, and how much a small UX detail (like graceful error recovery) changes how trustworthy a demo feels.

What's next for CareerVerse

• Persistent accounts — Supabase auth so simulation history, scores, and progress actually save instead of resetting on refresh.
• A real dashboard — careers explored, average score, streaks, and a "recommended next career" feed based on past Career DNA results.
• More careers — expanding beyond the initial six, with community-suggested roles.
• Downloadable Career DNA report — a shareable PDF summary, so students can bring it to a counselor or parent conversation.
• Voice mode — letting the simulation be spoken instead of typed, so it feels closer to an actual conversation with a mentor.
• More languages — the current English/Spanish/French/Igbo set is a starting point; we'd like this to be genuinely global.
• Partnering with schools and career counselors — turning this from a personal exploration tool into something a guidance counselor could assign to a whole class.

Built With

• anthropic-api
• claude
• express.js
• node.js
• react
• react-router
• tailwindcss
• vite