College Ready

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  User Dashboard

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  Extracurricular Guide

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  Resume Submission

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  User Resume

Inspiration

The primary inspiration behind our project is our personal experiences as high school students preparing for college! Especially since one member of our team is a first-generation college student applying for colleges herself, our team has firsthand experience with how frustrating and overwhelming applying to college can be when you don’t have guidance. So, we decided to create an app to help keep students on track for applying to college, as well as streamline the entire process!

What it does

Our application provides students with a complete, interactive, and easy-to-use guide for getting into college. It focuses on two parts, both of which are equally important to getting into college: first, preparing for college by building a strong resume and then, actually applying for college. The app will guide students through both parts with checklists and comprehensive guides that explain what to do and how to do it.

How we built it

1. We established the idea for our application by examining trends and determining what key issues we wanted to focus on. We looked at several trends, but the main one that we were focused on was the relationship between going to college and being generally successful in life.
2. With this trend in mind, we established the issue/hair on fire problem we wanted to solve. Our issue is that figuring out how to get into college can be difficult for low-income and first generation college students.
3. Once we established this general issue, we formulated a plan to solve the issue. Our plan was to create an app that made applying to college simple and helped students get into the college of their dreams.
4. We continued by expanding the idea and working out what specifically students would need to succeed. This included prompts and notifications to help keep them on track, as well guides to explain why, how, and what to do.
5. Then, we worked on clearly defining our pitch and building the app interface to display the foundation of our app.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest struggles we had was coming up with an idea for our “hair on fire problem”. We were searching for a solution, rather than examining our own experiences to find an issue close to us. However, once we shifted our perspective, we found an idea that we all felt passionate about making a project for!

Another struggle throughout this project was our often diverting views on how to approach the project and what exactly should be included. Creative differences are a part of working with others to make a project though, and our different thoughts and perspectives ultimately helped us improve our idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One accomplishment we are proud of is simply that fact that we were able to work together as a team! Despite how different our opinions often were, we were able to discuss, compromise, and come to agreement. Furthermore, we were able to use our communication skills to create an amazing idea. After having to scrap many ideas and plans, we experienced an amazing brainstorming session where we built our idea, one feature at a time. We were so proud when we began presenting it to advisors and friends as we received great feedback and responses. As a team, we were able to take our collective idea and implement this into Honeycode in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Our pitch took a bit of work, but we were finally able to all participate and generate the best presentation for our group.

What we learned

In terms of technical skills, we learned a lot about how to use the Honeycode application, create a strong and effective pitch, and effectively manage a limited amount of time. We also learned the importance of shifting perspectives and being creative! Throughout our process, we struggled a bit with formulating ideas because we kept allowing ourselves to get stuck in one perspective and one idea rather than being open to changing things.

What's next for College Ready

With more time resources, we hope to continue to develop in-depth guides and videos for our users, as well as improve features on the app. Besides general development, we would also love to create some sort of mentorship program involving college students throughout the United States who may serve as advisors to students applying to college! The high school students could begin discussing with a college mentor as soon as they get the app, allowing them to receive one-on-one advice from someone with experience in applying for college.

We would also love to expand our idea to a website that would serve as a database for all of the resources we make, making it accessible to those who just need a little bit of information at certain times. Expanding to a website and including some small ads would be a great way for us to make some profit while still fulfilling our promise of providing students with resources at no cost.

Built With

• honeycode