ConnectEd

From 'Did you see my email?' to "Here's where we are".

Comment

ConnectEd 🔗

Elevator Pitch

ConnectEd — Connecting students and counselors in one place.

A centralized platform that turns scattered counseling emails into organized, trackable requests with deadlines, priorities, required materials, and clear communication.

Credential For Login

Counselor login Email: counselor.demo@connected.app Password: ConnectEd2026!

Student login Email: student.demo@connected.app Password: ConnectEd2026!

Inspiration

I go to a large high school with around 4,000 students and only 8 counselors, and I've personally experienced how difficult it can be to get a request noticed.

I've sent emails to my counselor that have been missed or buried. It's not because counselors don't care, it's because they're supporting a huge number of students while receiving an overwhelming number of emails every day.

And counseling requests aren't simple emails. A student might need a transcript, recommendation letter, college form, appointment, or another document, often with a very specific deadline.

That made me wonder:

What if these requests weren't treated like emails at all?

What if they worked more like organized tasks, where both the student and counselor could see exactly what needs to happen?

That's where ConnectEd came from.

What it does

ConnectEd is a two-sided platform built for both students and counselors.

For students

Students can:

  • Select their counselor
  • Create a structured counseling request
  • Choose what they need
  • Add college and deadline information
  • Upload required documents
  • See what's missing
  • Track their request status
  • Communicate with their counselor

Instead of wondering whether an email was seen, students can see exactly where their request stands.

For counselors

Counselors get a dashboard that organizes requests instead of forcing them to search through an inbox.

They can see:

  • 🔴 Urgent requests
  • 🟠 Requests due soon
  • 🟡 Requests waiting on students
  • 🟢 Requests ready to process
  • ✅ Completed requests

Opening a request gives the counselor the student's information, deadline, documents, request history, and communication in one place.

ConnectEd can also identify incomplete requests before counselors begin working on them.

For example:

Recommendation Letter — Rice University ✅ College selected ✅ Deadline entered ✅ Resume uploaded ❌ Brag sheet missing

The student can fix the missing information before the counselor has to email them about it.

How we built it

I built ConnectEd as a full-stack web application with separate experiences for students and counselors.

The application includes:

  • Student and counselor authentication
  • Role-based dashboards
  • Structured request creation
  • Request status tracking
  • Deadline-based prioritization
  • Document uploads
  • Request-specific communication
  • Counselor workload information
  • AI-assisted request organization

For the prototype, I used demo data instead of real student information.

AI tools were also used during development for brainstorming, UI/UX ideas, coding assistance, debugging, and refining the product.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was deciding how much to build.

There are so many things we could eventually connect to ConnectEd — school information systems, academic records, calendars, college applications, and more.

But trying to build everything would have taken away from the main problem.

So we focused on one core workflow:

Student submits → request is checked → counselor sees it → counselor processes it → student gets an update.

Another major challenge was thinking about privacy.

Student academic and counseling information is sensitive, so we deliberately kept the hackathon prototype separate from real student records. Any future integration with systems such as HAC would need to be approved and implemented with the school's IT and privacy requirements in mind.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

I'm most proud that ConnectEd started with a problem I personally experienced and turned it into something that could potentially help an entire school community.

We didn't just build another form.

We built a complete workflow connecting two sides of the counseling process.

A student can submit a request with a deadline and required materials, and a counselor can immediately see what needs attention without searching through an inbox.

I'm also proud of the idea of making incomplete requests visible before they become another email exchange.

That small change could save counselors time while making the process much less stressful for students.

What We Learned

The biggest thing I learned is that solving a problem isn't always about adding more technology.

Sometimes the problem is simply that the existing process wasn't designed to scale.

Email works really well for conversations.

It doesn't work nearly as well for managing hundreds of deadline-driven tasks across thousands of students.

I also learned that building for a real environment means thinking about things beyond the interface — especially privacy, permissions, data security, and how a school would actually adopt the product.

Most importantly, I learned that talking to the people experiencing a problem is one of the best ways to figure out what should actually be built.

What's Next for ConnectEd

The current version is a prototype, but I see ConnectEd becoming much more than a request management system.

Next, I'd like to:

  • Add school-approved integrations with existing systems
  • Improve the AI request and priority assistant
  • Add better counselor workload analytics
  • Add configurable request templates for different schools
  • Add appointment scheduling
  • Improve notifications and reminders
  • Build stronger accessibility features
  • Run a small pilot with real students and counselors
  • Become the complete ecosystem of Counsellor-Student Connection

Eventually, ConnectEd could expand beyond counseling requests into a broader student-support platform that understands a student's journey and helps connect them with the right people at the right time.

But the core idea would stay the same:

Students shouldn't have to wonder if their request got lost, and counselors shouldn't have to dig through their inbox to find it.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history