ConnectED

ConnectED seamlessly integrates mentor matching, scholarship discovery, and financial aid calculation to empower students in their pursuit of higher education.

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Inspiration 🌟

First-generation students spend 45% more time on average contributing to their academic success, yet they still have 10% lower graduation rates. As immigrants and students ourselves, we see firsthand the difficulty of balancing demanding coursework with part-time jobs to support their families and repay student loans. FGLI students spend 10-20 hours a week applying for scholarships, working 10 times harder than their peers to get those scholarships. 60% of this time is spent just looking for scholarships because this process is filled with confusion about the opportunities they can receive and a substantial lack of guidance.

As a team, we knew that this was a problem we needed to tackle since scholarships are vital for students to escape generational cycles and look toward a brighter future. These barriers in the scholarship search and mentorship process contribute to educational inequalities, causing many students to miss out on the financial aid and support they need to succeed academically and in their careers.

What it does 💡

ConnectED makes scholarships accessible for FGLI students, by allowing them to gain exposure, receive mentorship, and find targeted scholarship opportunities. We divided our solution into three key parts:

  • Scholarship Feed: matches you to scholarships based on financial need, demographics, intended major, and location. We have a comprehensive, regularly updated database from universities, private organizations, and government programs. With an intuitive swipe interface similar to Tinder, you can swipe right to save scholarships and left to remove them. Saved scholarships are added to a personalized list and tracked on your calendar, simplifying your scholarship search.
  • Financial Aid Calculator and School Comparison Tool: helps with financial planning by estimating aid packages based on family & student income, savings, and educational expenses. We display results on your expected family contribution (EFC) and your potential aid options to appropriately budget for your future. The School Comparison Tool lets you evaluate financial aid opportunities across universities, considering factors like need-blind policies and available scholarship money, helping you find the best financial support.
  • Peer Mentoring: only 25% of high schools offer resources for scholarship applications, our platform allows students to upload descriptions of themselves and their scholarship interests. A smart algorithm pairs them with mentors who share similar interests and backgrounds, providing personalized guidance and support to enhance application quality and build a supportive network.

How we built it 🛠️

The Stack: Python, Google API Client, NLTK :: Natural Language Toolkit, Scrapy

For our front end, we used Figma, creating a minimalist and intuitive design mockup so that any user can visualize the flow of our app. In the future, we plan on using MERN: MongoDB, Express, React, and Node to build our full-stack app.

To develop the Mentor Matching functionality we started by setting up our user interface to collect student descriptions. Using the NLTK library, we processed these inputs to extract keywords by tokenizing the text and removing stopwords, focusing on the student's interests and expertise. Mentor data is stored in a CSV file with names and corresponding areas of expertise keywords. We use a Jaccard similarity coefficient calculation to identify overlaps between student and mentor keywords. Then, we employed linear programming with the pywraplp library to optimize pairings, ensuring each mentor is matched with only one student for maximum utility. Results are then communicated to the user, providing details of the matched mentor or indicating if no suitable match is found.

For the Scholarship Finder, Scrapy was utilized to develop spiders capable of extracting scholarship information from various websites such as Fastweb, Scholarships.com, and CollegeBoard. Each spider is tailored to navigate and scrape specific data from these sites, including scholarship details, deadlines, and links. The scraped data is temporarily stored in a structured list format before being uploaded to a Google Spreadsheet using Google's API, for which users authenticate via OAuth 2.0 protocol. Important scholarship deadlines are added to the user's Google Calendar, ensuring that students do not miss crucial application dates.

The Financial Aid Calculator was designed to provide an analysis of a student's financial needs for higher education. It prompts users to enter financial data, including family and student income, assets, and expenses, as well as information on scholarships, loans, and work-study arrangements. This data feeds into several computational functions that estimate the Expected Family Contribution (EFC), calculate student and parent contributions, and determine the student's total financial aid package. This allows students and families to gain a clear understanding of their financial responsibilities and aid eligibility, which is critical for planning and budgeting for college expenses.

Challenges we ran into 🏔️

One of the primary challenges was the integration of new APIs and libraries with each having distinct functionalities and specifications. Specifically, using the Scrapy library to scrape scholarship data from multiple websites was difficult to integrate because each website used for scraping had varying HTML structures. Adapting the spiders to accurately extract and standardize data from different formats was a time-consuming process with a lot of trial and error involved.

Another issue we ran into was streamlining our mentor matching for Natural Language Processing, especially ensuring the optimization of the keyword extraction process to improve match accuracy. Therefore in our app, we will ask users their preferences and provide sample user responses which users can reference to write an effective mentor match description. Additionally, our linear programming algorithms will have greater computational resource demands as more users join ConnectED. To not sacrifice performance we will need to fine-tune our algorithms in the future as we grow to balance demands and efficiency!

We spent a lot of time trying to simulate an intuitive user interface, especially for the swipe feature which required many design iterations and mockups. Throughout the UI design process, we had to structure and map the functionalities of each view so that there were no redundancies and everything flowed well together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆

Our proudest accomplishments include:

  • Being able to extract data and information from resources around the world. 🌎
  • Expanding our knowledge and skills in user-friendly design, linear programming, web scraping, and API utilization. 🚀
  • Laying the groundwork for a supportive community where students can have support in the scholarship and college application process. 🔊

What we learned 🧠

Building ConnectED provided us with valuable knowledge, including learning how to use linear programming models and efficiently utilize APIs, such as Google API Client to access Google Calendar and Google Sheets. We honed our skills in designing user-friendly products by focusing on creating intuitive interfaces and enhancing the user experience. Additionally, we gained a deeper understanding of the financial aid process, enabling us to develop tools that help students and families navigate their financial responsibilities and aid eligibility. We also learned to implement web scraping tools, like Scrapy, to efficiently gather and manage data from external sources, such as scholarship websites. Due to every website having varying structures, it was important to learn the different HTML specifications of each to web scrape effectively.

What's next for ConnectED 🔮

We are looking forward to developing ConnectED into a fully-fledged app using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js). We aim to scale ConnectED into a platform that helps students focus on their education without the stress of financial constraints.

We plan to add a community forum where students can share their experiences with the scholarship application process, exchange ideas, and ask questions. This feature will enhance the ConnectED mentorship network by fostering peer relationships and providing a platform for students to connect and support each other.

Join us on our journey to redefine the scholarship search process and education with ConnectED! 📚💡

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