🚀 dreamer

"dream it. check it. real it. ✨"

🌎 The Vision

Choosing a path in life shouldn't feel like a high-stakes gambling match. Most students are told to "follow their dreams" without ever seeing the receipts for what those dreams actually cost—or how much a specific job actually pays out in the real world.

dreamer (v1.0) was built to replace "I hope this works" with "I know this works." By gamifying the life-planning process, we’re giving students a stress-free sandbox to test-drive their futures. We’re bridging the gap between career aspirations and lifestyle reality, ensuring the next generation makes moves based on real-world math, not just guesswork.

✨ What is dreamer?

dreamer is a client-side life-planner web app designed for the "What if?" generation. Whether you’ve got a dream job in mind or a dream lifestyle you’re unwilling to compromise on, dreamer runs the numbers to show you exactly how those two worlds collide.

The Three-Way Move

✨ dream it (Life → Career): Paint the perfect life—the city, the travel, the frequency of concerts—and we’ll find the jobs that actually make it happen.
💼 job check (Career → Life): Pick a job that sounds fire and see what kind of life that paycheck actually supports.
🎯 reality check (The Vibe Check): Be real about what you want in a job AND a life. We give you a score from 1 to 5 to tell you how well they match. No judgment, fr fr.

🛠️ Client-Side Tech Stack

To keep things snappy and responsive, the current version of dreamer runs entirely on the client side:

HTML5: Semantic structure for a clean, accessible user experience.
CSS3 (BEM Methodology): Styled with a Block-Element-Modifier organization (e.g., .option-card, .option-card__desc). This keeps our style.css modular and professional—perfect for judge review.
Vanilla JavaScript: The "brains" of the operation. Located in script.js, our logic handles the life-math and scoring system instantly in the browser.
HUD Fair Market Rent API: Connecting to realtime data for the purpose of getting rent estimations that a specific to location (Client and Server)
Mock Data Engine: Currently uses a curated internal dataset to simulate real-world salary and cost-of-living variables.

🗣️ The Vibe Check

We ditched the boring financial jargon. dreamer talks to you like a cool older classmate who wants to see you win.

dreamer says: "Chicago on a firefighter’s salary is a mood, but 6 vacations? You’re flying a bit too close to the sun, bestie. After rent in the Windy City, your 'fun fund' is looking a little thin. Maybe dial it back to 3 trips or check out a suburb where your paycheck goes further. Score: 2/5 (Needs a tweak)."

📈 Roadmap (Future "Add-ons")

dreamer is designed for easy expansion. Our next moves include:

Live Salary Integration: Moving beyond mock data to pull real-time stats from career APIs.
Housing Market API: Fetches live rental and mortgage averages for cities like Chicago, Sacramento, and NYC.
The "Student Loan" Variable: A toggle to factor in education debt based on your chosen career path.
Job Density Score: A metric showing how likely you are to get Job X in City Y based on current employment trends.

Developed for Grizzhacks 8 2026. Team Members Danielle Mckinney Whitney Davis Ben Tranter Saood Qureshi