GlobaLink

GlobaLink empowers immigrant professionals by increasing access to career networking opportunities, professional mentors, and immigrant community within the United States.

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Inspiration

GlobaLink was inspired by 3 of our group members' former HCI project, where we tackled the problem area of increasing equity for immigrants in the U.S. With strict employment timelines (as little as 6 months) and a heavy dependence on employers for sponsorship, many immigrants such as H1-B visaholders get stuck in exploitative working conditions in the States. During previous needfinding interviews with US immigrants, we also learned the difficulty of adjusting to life in the US and the desire for immigrant or ethnic communities to provide advice and support. As such, we had hoped to tackle the major issues of labor exploitation, employment access, and helping immigrants find supportive communities. After the success of our HCI project, we wanted to actually code out GlobalLink, and UGAHacks9 provided a great opportunity to do so!

What it does

GlobaLink is a networking and mentorship platform. Immigrants can search for mentors, and our program will match them with suitable mentors (depending on industry, country of origin, visa-types, and more), so that users can have a variety of mentors for areas such as professional advice or the immigration process.

How we built it

We used React & Bootstrap to build our frontend, and connected via flask to a python backend. We also used MongoDB with flask by using the pymongo library. We also used Cloudflare Workers AI to develop a separate matching algorithm process, however, it was not chosen as our final matching algorithm.

Challenges we ran into

  • Cloudflare Worker AI integration into the project
  • Integration of python with MongoDB via pymongo
  • JWT Authorization tokens

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Significant progress in learning frontend, since we're mostly new to it
  • Development of a full stack application
  • Finding out how to use an AI matching algorithm and have it be dynamic
  • Integrating a database into our full-stack app

What we learned

  • Bootstrap is great
  • Passage of props and data in React
  • Database querying
  • Cloudflare Worker Development

What's next for GlobaLink

We hope to fully flesh out GlobaLink in the future. We ran into huge issues of scope in this project - it's a large application that probably needs far more time to furnish and flesh out.

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