Career Recommendation System

Inspiration

We realized that an educational related project can be something more than just a learning app so we brainstormed about some other educational problems as students ourselves. Seeing that education is less about learning but way more about competing, we decided we wanted to turn that the other way around. We feel like if you really like learning something you'd STOP caring about competing and comparing, and START trying to get more knowledge or more skills or experience on that. "Can we something that helps them find out what they might like to explore more?" Now that we have the idea, let's see how we solve this problem.

What it does

So the website recommends courses and extracurriculars for you based on your entered passions or majors. There is a box for you to enter your passion and find recommendations immediately. But if you're still not sure what you should enter, or you're wondering which major you might like to take in the future, you can check out our 'Find Your Major' quiz page. There we ask you questions related to how much you like doing something or how much you enjoy learning something, we then give you ideas on what you should major in or your possible passion that you should explore more.

How we built it

Once we decided on what problem we wanted to solve, we started making storyboards. We designed the layout of the website to look simple but interactive, and we made sure that it would be able to serve its main purposes. Then we started the coding process! Using html with javascript, we worked together on Visual Studio Code via live share sessions. We tested the project on our browsers, and slowly builded the website step by step based on our plans. We worked mainly on the frontend part first. Then after finishing the basic features like buttons, input, etc., we moved on to saving answer values from the quiz, preparing to send them to the API. We then started integrating the API into the website, making it fully functioning and actually recommending the majors. Last part is making the website recommend the resources based on the entered passions or majors. We tried to also used the API here, but we ran out of time so we manually input the recommendations, creating a prototype for what the web should look. Then we display the results on the recommendation page. After finishing everything, we hosted the website on the internet. DONE!

Challenges we ran into

The first problem we faced was that the website wasn't so responsive. At first we only tested using one normal sized browser, and didn't think about how it'd look on other devices with different screen size. So when we looked at it from another browser from another screen, the components looked messy and very much inorganized. So we worked on making the web 'responsive', changing the looks of the components and using more of % instead of px to adapt to different screens.

Second problem was that when we first tried to use API in our project for recommending majors to take, we tried to used OpenAI api and found out that it has to be paid, so we struggled quite awhile with trying to find other APIs that'd be usable but also free of cost. Then we found Cohere, it helps a lot!

Looking at our website, it was functionable, but the colors are not quite suitable. Everything looked different from each other, there wasn't much harmony. Therefore, we decided on making color palette for the web, making it looks the way it does now.

While working on this project, we were both beginners, so we faced several challenges, like struggling to find an error, struggling with integrating the API, or with storing and displaying values. However, with enough dedication, we learned to find solutions for most of these using resources on the internet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Prior to this hackathon we didn't have much experience working with frontend and with APIs, and now I think its safe to say that we are some what experienced in this domain.

What we learned

We learned a lot more about js, html, and css. Building the website from scratch makes us improve our problem solving and collaboration skills. We also got more experience on working with API and fetching data from it. This is going to be very useful in our upcoming projects since API is being used in almost every website. As for general knowledge, we got to learn more about different majors and how each of them is related to different passion, interest, and personality.

What's next for Career Recommendation System

As indicated in the How we built it part, we were able to make the overall website and quiz part functionable. However, the resources recommendation part is still a prototype of API usage. We look forward to making that part functionable as expected in the future so that the users would be able to gain a lot more from the website.

Built With

• cohere
• css
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• vercel