CollAssist

A website designed to assist students from lower income backgrounds with college applications.

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Inspiration

As a high-school student, I understood that there exists a strong resource gap between those who can afford resources and tutoring, and those who cannot. These resources aren't just concerning tutoring and test preparation, but also with regards to extra-curriculars, and most importantly, financial literacy - as these students, upon entering college, usually have limited knowledge due to their low individual finances.

What it does

CollAssist serves a number of features.

  1. For an understanding of SAT scores needed for colleges, the website displays an average SAT chart table on its website.
  2. To assist low income students with financial literacy, the website has a finance calculator to assist these students with their issues such as loans, savings and budgeting.
  3. The site also has a database, where the Net Price Calculators of universities are loaded, and links provided. This can assist low income students by giving them the right site to find their income brackets
  4. The site displays some suggested extra-curricular activities for some college majors, to assist students with ideas regarding them.
  5. The site also takes into account applicants' test scores and extracurriculars, and suggests improvements if applicable to strengthen their application. This tool is not a college counsellor, but rather a system that enables them to quickly gauge their application strength.
  6. Lastly, the site also features a Future Sneak Peek tab, where users can see our soon-to-come embedded display system that greatly enhances the user experience.

How we built it

The site was built entirely using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The site is entirely remote, meaning that for now, until monetization, the site runs on the user's localhost.

I gathered some experience from YouTube videos for some styling, and loaded fonts from Google Fonts.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge I ran into was with the future plan embedding system, which is why it is loaded as a future plan and not a full feature. There were 2 constraints to this:

  1. The JavaScript coding was very tricky for this, as I had to integrate a raw text URL as a hyperlink for an iFrame. However, I persisted and eventually managed to break this barrier.

  2. For security reasons and to prevent DDOS attacks, most large sites block the iframe tag to access their website, which is why majority of Net Price Calculator websites are actually blocked, unless one requests for HTTPS X-Frame to allow an iframe on their own websites to show the Net Price Calculator. This is an issue that I can only tackle upon monetisation, which is why I used two placeholder universities - Harvard and MIT as Sneak Peeks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

My JavaScript knowledge was very limited, but through this experience, and through persisting through the above mentioned hardships, I developed my JS abilities.

Furthermore, I am happy with the fact that the final product UI is something that I believe users will be comfortable using, and is not overly primitive.

What we learned

Other than honing my skills in CSS, JS and HTML5, this hackathon also opened my eyes to the resource discrepancy problem. With only a handful of students locking in on seats in top universities, it truly is remarkable when those from low income backgrounds are still able to make it to the top despite their struggles.

What's next for CollAssist

Upon monetisation, I wish to be able to access the API and HTML5 HTTPS X-frame in order to make the future plan section a reality. If possible, we will push for free resources and low-cost college counselling for these students, to keep our business alive and their dreams afloat.

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