CollegeMaster

Virtualizing the College Counseling and Admission Process

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CollegeMaster

Official Hack for IvyHacks by Team CollegeMaster

Table of Contents

Inspiration

Finding resources and aid to get into your college of top choice can be complicated!
When we, as international high school students, applied to colleges in the United States, we faced a lot of hurdles through the application process. Finding the correct resources required us to travel. To ask the right questions, we had to pay a huge amount to a college counselor.

CollegeMaster is an app which provides high school students access to a community of essay reviewers, college students and alumni to connect with and ask the right questions, at their fingertips. College applicants can access student interviewers nearest to them through our real-time distance calculation algorithm. They can upload their essays to get insights from expert essay reviewers. They can browse through colleges, get information about each college and any college to their list of colleges for later reference in real-time.
How have we created this community?
We use the robustness of Google Maps to create an interactive worldwide network by representing each student interviewer who signs up with our service with our app's logo as a marker. Users can choose from them based on location, which will match them with the people with similar experiences and backgrounds, without having any in-person interaction. This is highly relevant, considering the times we are in. Users can also message other app users.

By making the entire process of college counseling and applications completely virtual, we are trying to make an impact in the Remote Education and Education Technology sectors.

How we built it

CollegeMaster is an iOS / Android app built with Flutter. It uses Firebase as a realtime backend storage. It also uses the Google Maps SDK for Android and for iOS to display a Worldwide Database of College Students and Alumni.

What it does

Few features have been implemented, while others have been shown for scalability.

Implemented Features

  • Discover Page
    • Search for colleges based on country
      • User can add any college to their My Colleges list for later reference
    • Cascading list of Student Interviewers and Essay Reviewers with their overview and prices
  • Essay Reviewing
    • Users can choose from country-specialized expert Essay Reviewers based on the country chosen during registration
    • Users can upload any type of file for essay reviewing
  • Student Interviewing
    • Users can choose to connect with alumni and current college students
      • Users can enable Location Services to see alumni and college students nearest to them (within a 350 miles radius)
    • Book appointments with them for mock interviews / meetups
  • Worldwide Database
    • Via the click of a single button, users can access a worldwide database of college students and alumni - created using the Google Maps API
    • Users can choose those college students and alumni who have similar backgrounds and experiences
    • Users can book appointments with them by clicking the markers on our map, represented by graduation hats (our app logo)
    • Book appointments with them for mock interviews / meetups
  • College Profile
    • Shows information about the college and user can add the college to their My Colleges list for later reference
  • User Profile
    • Shows the name of the user and My Colleges list

Scalable (Displayed) Features

  • Discover Page
    • Users can use a search bar to lookup Colleges / Essay Reviewers / College Students and Alumni
  • Tray
    • Users can access Visa Information about different countries, Scholarship Information about different colleges / countries and a Checklist showing deadlines for different college applications
  • Messaging
    • Connect with college students, alumni, essay reviewers and other college applicants
  • College Profile
    • Shows various data about the college like Acceptance Rate, Average Tuition, Rank, Average SAT Scores and Famous Alumni among others

Challenges we faced

  • This was the first time we implemented a project using Firebase as a backend and faced a few technical issues like configuring iOS and Android with the service and fetching data from the database. Moreover, Firebase updated its API in late August. Hence, there wasn't much documentation on issues.
  • Using the Google Maps API to serve our needs took time to figure out, but we successfully completed it with a few customizations like our logo being used as a marker and nearest student interviewers being shown.
  • We tried to use many custom and aesthetically pleasing widgets to create a user-friendly experience, which took time to implement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We are very proud to have built an app that has great scalability and potential for growth.
  • Being relatively new to Flutter, we didn't think that we would be able to create a fully functional app with real-time data retrieval. But, we did!
  • We are sophomores at Georgia Institute of Technology and this is our first hackathon in the United States. Coming in to IvyHacks, we were overwhelmed by the calibre of our competition. However, we put that past us and focused on the production of the app.

What we learned

  • We are now comfortable with data retrieval and are confident that we can use Firebase and Google Maps API for any project.
  • We strengthened our collaborative skills and dynamic with each other. We also discovered new features of GitHub.
  • We learned the importance of iterative development and adapting to changes and technical difficulties.

What's next for CollegeMaster

We believe that the community aspect of CollegeMaster provides us with a wide avenue of growth. Currently, two of our most relevant scalable features are Messaging and Search. The front-end for these features has been built, and all it needs is a Firebase backend. We plan to add more features to this app: Book Store, a custom Feed with posts, Visa Information for International Students and a Checklist among others.

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