honeycomb.

All smiles and hard at work

Inspiration

Georgia Tech ranks as one of the top public universities in the nation for return on investment. The campus is filled with avenues to secure a dream job or role with access to prestigious clubs, challenging courses, and opportunities to collaborate with peers on projects. However, the sheer volume of resources can become overwhelming, leading to a sense of "analysis paralysis" amongst students.

Our team was inspired by this challenge and decided to create "honeycomb.", a web app designed to guide students by generating personalized roadmaps. Our goal is to empower students to capitalize on their Georgia Tech experience and maximize their potential to land their dream job.

What it does

Honeycomb helps students by generating a personalized roadmap to achieve their professional goals, based on their major, dream company and role, skills, interests and rigor-level. This is done by curating a list of projects, clubs and classes, and an assortment of potential college connections they can reach out to.

How we built it

We started out the project with a paper prototype, followed by Figma prototyping. Further, we used React for the frontend and Node.js with Express for the backend. MongoDB serves as our database, storing user profiles. We implemented a user auth system with JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to secure user data.

For generating the tailored roadmap, we used multiple APIs:

Gemini, an advanced, open source LLM endpoint, to analyze user inputs — such as career goals, dream companies, and interests — and generate a list of recommended projects, clubs and classes
GT's Engage API to tap into the list of student organizations/clubs on campus
Grouch API to tap into Georgia Tech's course catalog

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was implementing a secure and reliable user authentication system. Handling user data, ensuring correct hashing of passwords, and managing JWTs securely for authentication was complex and required a careful approach. We also faced difficulties gaining access to and integrating APIs for pulling accurate, up-to-date data on clubs and classes. Another challenge was connecting the frontend and backend seamlessly, especially with managing states and asynchronous data fetching from the API.

Working with Gemini’s AI posed some challenges in fine-tuning the model’s outputs to ensure that the recommendations were not only relevant but actionable for users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of successfully building a working platform that provides users with real value in their internship search process. Our AI-driven personalized roadmap, powered by Gemini, works as intended, and we were able to integrate multiple 3rd party APIs like Engage and Grouch to bring external data into our system, enhancing the relevance of our recommendations. We’re also proud of the user authentication system – seamlessly fostering security,

Finally, we love our user-friendly interface that makes it easy for students to get started with their journey to landing internships. Connecting the frontend and backend using Node.js was a key milestone that made the app function smoothly from end to end.

What we learned

Throughout the project, we learned a great deal about AI integration through LLM-prompting using Google's Gemini API. Furthermore, we learned how to parse standardized JSON-formatted data generated by LLMs.

We gained experience in backend development, particularly with implementing secure user authentication. Additionally, designing the frontend was a major learning curve, and we enhanced our skills in tools like Figma, Dribble and Next.js.

What's next for honeycomb.

In the future, we plan to expand Honeycomb beyond Georgia Tech to other universities. We also want to enhance the Gemini-powered AI recommendation system by incorporating data points such as internship feedback and success stories from past users. Furthermore, we aim to improve the user authentication system with OAuth options for logging in via Google or LinkedIn.

We’re also considering introducing new features, such as real-time notifications for internship opportunities and a mentorship chat platform for connecting with alumni.