Gur-U

Inspiration

With the ever-changing economy shifting towards "on-demand" work, it is our goal to supplement the current admissions process with an enhanced organic way of understanding the true feeling of the university. GurU connects high school students with real college students (our GurU mentors) from the top universities around the country.

What it does

1. Help high school students find the perfect university: GurU mentors help provide mentorship and a better understanding of what the university life is really at any university.

2. Help navigate the admissions process: Our GurU mentors will help guide high school students though the admissions process by giving them tips on college applications, college interviews, scholarships, financial aid and much more!

3. Customized mentoring: If students have already found their top university or just want some guidance on how to grow personally, develop their skills or just be ready for college, GurU mentors can also provide customized mentoring to get the high school student prepared for everything college related.

How we built it

We built the web app using Node.js backend integrated with authentication using Interactive Intelligence api and IBM's bluemix api. The front end was developed mainly using Bootstrap.

We built the android app using

Challenges we ran into

Setting Up the Sign Up function with Interactive Intelligence Api

We struggled with setting up the sign up function with the Interactive Intelligence api. We received generous help from the mentors at Interactive Intelligence, but nonetheless were unable to get it to work correctly.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Having great teamwork Throughout the hackathon, we worked seamlessly as a team. Zachary was our incredibly crafty business guy, discovering customer pain points and coming up with ways to overcome them effectively. Joshua was our fun loving software engineer, integrating apis with the backend. Mohit was our sincere and honest API guy, also developing our Android app. Take was our Japanese Ruby on Rails web developer, developing the entire web design and front end. We were constantly laughing, having fun, all while overcoming challenges together as a team.

What I learned

Teamwork is Key The success of our team can be credited to our teamwork. We had 24 hours to hack, and we utilized every single second of it together.

What's next for GurU

・Government subsidies for low-income students who want to use the service ・Use GurU as a platform for other mentoring related processes. Anything from career mentoring, to religious based mentorships can have huge impacts and provide major developmental opportunities of people world wide.