JobJourney

Inspiration

This application cycle when applying for internships, it felt quite difficult to do everything at once: make projects, get experience, LeetCode, buff resume, network and get referrals. Eventually I realized that certain things mattered more to different employers, and wished there was an easy way to get internships based on what I was good at. For example, even if someone has little coding knowledge but has impeccable communication skills and a good work attitude, they should feel their potential for getting an internship without needing to spend a majority of their time coding. Many students come from different backgrounds and prefer different things, so I wanted to make this to make the process easier to follow and paired with their strengths for extra motivation (because it's hard to do things you're not as good at).

What it does

The JobJourney web app uses LinkedIn sign in to extract profile details to determine what professional "assets" you have. Whether it's projects, experience, or references, it will determine what next steps you need to take to land that next internship. When you first use the web app, it will prompt the user to input preferences like what their strength is (communication, smaller contributions to larger projects, larger contributions to smaller projects, project managing, etc.), then generate a dependency graph of what they need to do (ex. someone already has experience, then it's network->apply->interview->offer) determined by the Groq API based on online samples. Then, a dashboard is generated for the user to show them their personal graph of steps, the time they have to complete the current step, and resources they can use to help them. Another core functionality is Inquire, which uses the Linkd API to find points of contact to reach out to via email or LinkedIn to ask about their internship process if they had similar interests and have reached the goal (ex. secured a FAANG internship).

How we built it

We built this application using React.js, React Flow (Graph), and TailwindCSS for the frontend, and Spring Boot, MongoDB, Linkd API, Groq API, LinkedIn OAuth on the backend.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge I ran into was integrating frontend with backend. This was my first time using Spring Boot in a project, and it was a learning curve to learn Spring Boot while understanding how to use the REST API controller to expose an endpoint to retrieve data from via axios in the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of being able to use the Linkd API to find people to contact, because it makes the process seem easier when you know someone else has done it. As opposed to just asking an LLM what to do, the people and visualizationa spects of this application add that encouragement and transparency to the process. The internship process can be very demoralizing, so integrating the dependency graph with React Flow and the Linkd API integration are key components of our application.

What we learned

We learned how to use the Linkd, Groq, and LinkedIn APIs, as well as Spring Boot.

What's next for JobJourney

Future developments for the web app would include a results page, where users can be reminded to report their results in the process, whether it's interviews per application, offers per interview, or other metrics to adjust the approach based on what improvement they need in a certain area.

Built With

• axios
• groq
• javascript
• linkd
• linkedin
• mongodb
• react
• reactflow
• springboot
• tailwind