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Homepage
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Getting started
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International applicant page
Inspiration
Growing up, most of us made excuses after excuses as to be why we can’t be something we want to be. We are convinced dreams are just dreams. Intangible. Unrealistic. childish. And we all are realists here, never looking at the glass half empty or half full. For I am grateful to have a glass at all. College? Especially for children from low-income families, college seems out of reach above that if it’s for an international student- it’s near to impossible. At one point Our scribbles, “living the American dream”, started to sound funny. It took us days of talking-to-people who studied in US colleges and nights of research to realize our dreams are not intangible after all. We had to look around for a long time to figure out how to write college essays, how to get a full-ride scholarship, how to apply for financial aid, and chase after teachers for just a recommendation letter. But you don’t have to do that because we decided to make a place that will guide you to pursue your “American dream”, step by step, and save your time. Here we will be supporting you to pursue your education in your dream schools.
What it does
Living the American Dream is a static website with a collection of webpages. It will give you everything you need to know about applying to your dream school and guide you thoroughly. The application process is difficult and on top of that, the pandemic has become an addition to our daily troubles. Our aim is to create a place where we will teach students, step by step, how to apply to colleges and help them find their best fit coupled with all the resources (we found helpful). It will make sure that COVID-19 cannot snatch away the dreams students have dreamt since their childhood.
How we built it
Originally we planned an interactive, dynamic website with a customizable dashboard that would have signup/login features and give a unique experience to each applicant. But on top of the clock ticking we are just beginners so we took our mentors’ advice to make our website simpler, with no signup/login feature, using HTML and CSS. We used a little bit of JavaScript as well. We created the home page, a second page with card layouts, and more pages for the applicants to use as a comprehensive guide with a sidebar with dropdown menu. We took it one step at a time by looking at the prototype and wireframe from our UX design
Challenges we ran into
We struggled firstly with changing the size of containers and div blocks, then moving on to more intermediary things, we struggled with creating a hyperlink for the logo. Also, it was really challenging to create the sidebar and dropdown menu on the applicant webpages
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We couldn't complete all of the webpages because time was really a struggle for us. We took on a big project but we're confident that we could implement most pages on a smaller scale. If we had more time, we would have developed it a lot further
What we learned
There's a lot of information that might overwhelm and confuse students when they first apply to colleges. We understand that applying to colleges might be intimidating but we have learned that if we can gather all the resources with the help of one website, it makes it a lot easier for a student to navigate the whole process. We also have learned that though coding can be difficult, all the hard work put into coding makes it much easier.
What's next for Living the American Dream
We look forward to making an interactive dynamic website with a chatbot as well as a sign-up and login feature.
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