Lynks Homepage in English and Spanish
Form to request a tutor
Student tutor results
Form to search for ESL colleges
College search results
When you select a college, a page with more information about the college and its application shows.
Our database of college information

Lynks

Inspiration

Lynks was first inspired by the plethora of college finder programs available to non-minority students, who often have some prior experience with college or access to resources unavailable to others. Especially for English as a Second Language students, easy access to a central hub which houses the tools to get into a college was not available.

The effect of the lack of access to higher-education online learning tools for ESL students can be clearly seen: only 63% of students graduate high school and only 12% go to college.

This is why we created Lynks. We wanted to create an intuitive system which guides a user through finding personalized tutors to help them get into college and and searches for suitable colleges for them to apply to based on their academic prowess, ESL status, and other qualities.

How It Works

If a student wants to find a tutor for a class they are struggling in, all they have to do is open Lynks, navigate to the tutor search engine and input their name, email, and classes that they need help in. From there, a list from our database of tutors is recommended, prioritizing the tutors who can help the student in the most amount of subjects they are struggling with and providing them with their contact information.

If a student is in the process of searching for a college that meets their needs, all they have to do is navigate to the college search engine and input their name, GPA, SAT scores, interests, desired college location, and college size. With this information, Lynks will provide a list of colleges with good ESL programs ranked by how many of the student’s needs are met. By clicking on each college, the student can find more information and the application process.

How It Was Made

To build Lynks, we researched some of the top ESL colleges on the east coast and collected information about each school including their student to faculty ratio, top majors, and much more. By plotting all of this data on a spreadsheet, we are able to compare it to each user input and provide them with a ranked list of colleges through automation programming in Honeycode and a formula, which creates a score of how close each search result was to the student’s preferences. Using a similar process, we created a system to link students with tutors based on their credentials and the student’s subject needs.

Challenges

This project went fairly smoothly for us; however, we did have some challenges. The main challenges that we encountered when building Lynks was figuring out how to use Honeycode (a program foreign to us), creating a way to prioritize certain aspects of a student’s search, and polishing our promotional video through audio, visuals and content.

Accompishments

We are definitely proud of Lynks but are especially proud of a few aspects of the project. The program to find tutors was fairly easy to make, but the process of creating a system to prioritize certain colleges was significantly more difficult. Even with these challenges, we were able to make a very thorough college search program, which we think is an accomplishment. A few other parts of our project that we are proud of include a detailed list of college information (which took a long time to gather), a database of tutors, and the quality of our pitch video.

What We Learned

There were many parts of this project that were completely new to us, which meant we had to learn a lot while working on our project. We learned how to use Amazon Honeycode, got experience in spreadsheets, and built professional video making/editing skills.

Future Improvements

Lynks is definitely not in its final state, and there are some major changes that we want to make in order to improve the program going forward. In the future, we want to create an AI to optimize the selection of colleges by creating a priority for certain aspects of a student’s search. We also plan to team up with colleges, tutors, and other ESL organizations to broaden our horizons, add more colleges and information to the college finder, and create a pathway to automate the collection of displayed information. Moreover, we will include more parameters in an individual student’s search, allow our program to be read in more languages by teaming up with native speakers (Chinese, Arabic, and French along with the existing Spanish), and create a system where students can search for scholarships.

Through Lynks, we have created a startup that encompasses the main 3 qualities that Y Combinator wants to see in a diverse education program:

We “dramatically improve outcomes for children”
We “reduce inequality”
We “have the potential to enhance the future quality of life for those children and their families.”