Compass

Inspiration

1 in 5 UMD students face food insecurity — yet less than half knew the Campus Food Pantry existed. Over 50% of students who withdrew from UMD cited mental health as the primary reason. The resources exist. Students just can't find them. Compass was built for every first-gen student who didn't know they could get $1,500 in emergency aid, free counseling, or free food — just by asking.

What it does

Compass is a voice-enabled AI navigator that listens to a student's situation and instantly surfaces the right UMD resources - with real contact info, one-click action buttons, and zero judgment. Students describe what's going on in their own words. Compass triages urgency, identifies the underlying need, and returns structured resource cards: the Campus Food Pantry, the Economic Crisis Response Grant, the Counseling Center, and more - all verified, all real, all actionable.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js 16, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript
AI: Claude Sonnet 4.6 via the Anthropic API
Key insight: Instead of returning markdown text like a chatbot, Claude returns structured JSON - urgency level, resource cards, action buttons. The UI renders that JSON as a real product, not a conversation.
Voice input: Web Speech API for hands-free access
Resources: All UMD resources hardcoded as verified ground truth in the system prompt - Claude selects from the list, never invents.

Challenges we ran into

Getting Claude to return consistent structured JSON across varied, emotional student inputs was the core challenge. We solved it with a strict system prompt schema and a fallback markdown renderer for edge cases. We also had to fix React hydration errors from Math.random() running on the server.