Funds for Future

Inspiration

When we were high school freshmen, we experienced a hard time finding scholarships. We didn’t know where to look or which opportunities we qualified for, and the process felt overwhelming. That experience inspired us to create Funds For Future, a platform designed to help students discover funding opportunities and navigate the application process with more confidence.

What it does

Funds For Future helps users explore funding opportunities and organize their application journey. It brings opportunity discovery and application tracking into one place so users can stay focused on their goals.

How we built it

We built the website using Next.js, TypeScript for full-stack development, and PostgreSQL on Tiger Data to store and manage student profile and scholarship data, and integrated Gemini to generate compatibility scores based on how well a student’s profile matches a scholarship’s requirements. We used GitHub to manage our code and collaborate on features through separate branches.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was finding databases of funding opportunities and cleaning the data to ensure it was consistent and useful for students. We initially chose a Kaggle dataset, but it didn't provide quality we need for the purpose of our application. We also struggled to find reliable single source of student loan data, so we weren’t able to include any loans in this version of Funds for Future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of turning our idea into a working website and creating a foundation for a tool that could help people pursue opportunities. We also gained confidence working through development/communication challenges together.

What we learned

We learned how to find and clean scholarship data, build web interfaces, and collaborate using GitHub. We also learned how to use Gemini to generate compatibility scores based on how well a student’s profile matches a scholarship’s requirements, helping students identify opportunities that fit them. We also gained experience storing and managing our data with PostgreSQL and Tiger Data.