CV Generator

An outputted CV sample

Inspiration

So many jobs require experience. But how do you get experience without a job? This vicious, infamous loop seems to be a common struggle among students trying to obtain their first internship, or even later as they try to land a fulltime job. We empathize with this struggle, and aim to relieve some of that stress, as these students can often undersell themselves.

What it does

Our product facilitate the CV-forming process by reducing it to a survey-like engagement in which the reward is a functional CV. Minimal questions are asked while also striving for the most balanced and optimized solution. While these generators have existed in the past, what makes ours unique is that it is targeted at McGill students. By doing so, we gather much of our data simply by the user's selection of passed classes. As part of this project, we have created a database of McGill courses and their associated skills, so that simply knowing which courses a student has taken gives a strong idea of their skills.

How we built it

We first created a simple plan, domain model, and GitHub repository. Then we developed an Android UI that would be the user's connection to the program, as they feed the controller, which writes the file. The writing is done based on a loose initial template, which has keys that are to be replaced throughout the writing process with larger peices of variable HTML and CSS code.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some challenges with regards to reading a writing files, as this entire process must change as we go mobile. This was related to a consistent problem we faced, which is the method in which we would show the CV to the user.

Another challenge was to prioritize the collected data so that we would only keep enough to fill one page. We managed this by assigning priority indices which we used to address whether one element was more important than another (i.e. an internship over a volunteer experience).

In the same vein, we faced the challenge of what to do should the data be generally lacking, thus generating a sparse CV. To solve this problem, we created many other less technical types of elements that would have lower priority in general, but could be used to fill out the CV if necessary.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Not taking the easy way out in many situations where it could have been easy to hardcode, etc. We are particularly proud of the persistence in following out a step-by-step plan that allowed us to finish comfortably before the deadline. This can often be a challenge in software development, and so any time it is achieved it should be celebrated.

What we learned

Making things ever so slightly more convenient for the user can make the development job ever so much more inconvenient. However, following frameworks and design strategies learned in class can drastically help making

What's next for CV Generator

We have plans to autogenerate text using the simple inputs we've made, where the program could take keywords or bullets and transform them into bitesize paragraphs and descriptions. The goal of this would be to require even less input from the user, and we would use machine learning to do so.