Inspiration
We were inspired to create a website dedicated to helping low-income students discover and pursue potential career opportunities by struggles that many of these students face. Many students from low-income and/or first generation backgrounds often do not have access to guide their futures. They are often unaware of the vast potential they possess. We believe that all students deserve a chance to explore their skills, talents, and career dreams. By providing them with a resource to help them find a career and a plan, we hope that these students will be able to pursue a fitting career to fulfill their potential. We are lucky to have the resources we have, and are excited to use them to benefit others. Our goal is to illuminate the path towards success for these students, ensuring they are aware of the bright future they too can have.
What it does
The website provides a career quiz for the user to take. The user selects an answer from the provided options for each question. These questions help determine the user's interests, gives them a potential job field, and then allows them to go more in-depth on that field by asking more specific questions to pinpoint a potential career. Then at the end, it provides the user with a plan on how to achieve that career.
How we built it
We coded this website in Java, using Intellij as our ide. The backend consists of two classes, a Questions class and a CareerQuiz class. The CareerQuiz class handles all of the logic behind the quiz. A score for each general career category is kept, and answering a question with an option relating to an interest in that category will increase the score for that category. This is how we determined which careers fields to recommend to the user. A score is also kept for specific traits to determine a specific career to recommend. The code will provide the user with a plan on going into that career after the career is determined. Multiple career paths can also be recommended if the user shows general interest in more than one.
Challenges we ran into
A challenge we ran into was getting the front end of the website up. All of us have good knowledge in backend coding, but the front end was difficult for us. We tried our very best to get the front end going. As for making the quiz itself, we struggled to figure out the best ways to make and present the questions. We concluded with making an entire Java class for questions, which gave us lots of flexibility in adding and updating important components such as the answers. Another hurdle we faced was figuring out how to determine what career to give to the user. We solved this by making a scoring system that gives a score to a category tied directly to each multiple choice answer. A final major issue we faced was with the questions and themselves. We needed to meticuously come up with questions that covered nearly everybody, and tried our best to do this as efficiently as possible.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of completing the fully functional back end code through collaboration and hard work.
What we learned
Through this project, we extended our knowledge in Java by learning some new syntax. We also utilized new tools that were unbeknownst to us until now.
What's next for Potential Paths
In the near future, we plan to get the website up and running completely, as a website that anyone can go onto and visit. We plan to add more features, such as providing college information/opportunities to low income students, and also enhancing the existing career quiz by adding more questions, careers, and more detailed career plans. On top of all of this, we also plan on making the front end look nicer.
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