Course2Career

User Input Form

Inspiration

As sophomores, many of us start exploring internships only to realize too late that we lack a key skill required for a position. Similarly, when choosing courses and clubs, it can be unclear which ones will enhance our abilities beyond the core requirements. This often leads to missed opportunities and regret moments. We wanted to build a platform that helps Tufts students connect their courses, club and skills with potential career paths. By doing so, students can proactively plan their academic and extracurricular choices, understand the skills they need to develop and make informed decisions about their future careers.

What it does

Course2Career takes in user’s input (courses taken, skills, club activities) and outputs personalized career recommendations with clear next steps to take.

How we built it

We generated the initial UI mockup using Figma Make, then refined the provided code to better suit the goals of the platform. We incorporated comprehensive lists of clubs and courses offered at Tufts University, using data from Tufts JumboLife and SIS respectively, to customize results for Tufts students. The final product is deployed using Netlify.

Challenges we ran into

We initially struggled with refining the code provided by Figma and updating it to better align with the Course2Career’s purpose.

Once updating the initial code, incorporating real course and club data proved to be a challenge as the datasets were so large. This required careful organization of our data to ensure lists were comprehensive without containing duplicate data.

Allowing users to be able to save the information, we added an export bottom where the career match results can be transformed into a json, txt, or pdf file. Ensuring files were formatted correctly when exporting provided an initial challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Under the limited time constraints, our team was able to come up with an idea and make it happen. In the end, we’re proud to have a working UI that can be used by the greater Tufts community.

What we learned

We have a better understanding of how to use React and Tailwind to create an accessible UI.

We also learned how to analyze large sets of data and compute weighted scores to provide custom recommendations that correspond to user input.

What's next for Course2Career

We hope to connect with platforms such as Handshake and other job boards to allow the matched job options to be more diverse and confirmed to the students. Additionally, we need to add more job options to our role library to broaden and increase the career match results.