MatchEd

Mentor/Mentee matching system made to provide equal opportunity, and education for everyone

Comment

Inspiration

It is difficult for individuals with no connections to make their first contacts within a new career or new country. This can especially be difficult for people changing careers and immigrants. Once a person has a few connections it becomes much easier to meet more people.

LinkedIn works well to connect to new people based on your existing connections. However, it is difficult for your first few quality connections within your industry to start your network growth.

We are also inspired by Schulich School of Engineering Mentorship Program. All of our members participated in the programs and received meaningful experience during our first year at University of Calgary. This is our initiative to make the mentorship program available to everyone.

What it does

The project is available at https://matched.themagehub.com/

Our solution is a mentor/mentee matching system designed to make your first industry connections. MatchEd helps bridge the gap between having no connections to having a few quality connections in your industry. We hope that this service will decrease the effect that nepotism has within all industries and increase success no matter your parents' connections.

Users are able to sign-up and create an account as either a mentor or mentee. As a mentor sign up, they specify their area of expertise and some additional optional labels to improve matching with mentees (e.g., languages spoken, location). As a mentee signs up they just specify their basic info. Mentees are then able to search for mentors that are experts in their area of interest and request that they are matched. The mentor has the ability to reject a request to match.

The mentor’s role is to provide guidance to advance their mentee's career. This can be in the form of educational resource suggestions or simply just inspiration for the career.

We additionally provided an auto-generated news tab to help the mentors with interesting conversation topics.

How we built it

Our website is created using create-react-app template with TypeScript, distributed using S3 bucket with CloudFront. CloudFront is a CDN (Content Delivery Network), allowing delivering our website efficiently over AWS networks.

For the Infrastructure as Code tool, AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) is used to provision AWS infrastructure on our account

We use DynamoDB for our backend, which is responsible for storing user credentials, and personal information of users such as interest, and mentees.

We build our HTTP API with AWS stack including API Gateway V2, Lambda which uses DynamoDB to store and manage data. The application has multiple HTTP endpoints, and the appropriate Lambda is triggered based on the request by the API Gateway. The functionalities of lambdas include creating, updating and deleting items in the DynamoDB. Currently the Lambda is also used to communicate with the external news API (newsapi.org), which fetches personalized news based on users' interests.

To facilitate quick development, we used Github Actions to automatically test and deploy our changes to AWS.

Challenges we ran into

  • Designing a project that fully utilizes all members' skills
  • Prioritizing certain features
  • Picking a project that requires significant time to build something already existing (e.g. the sign-in system)
  • Picking scalability over advanced mentor/mentee matching

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Multi-user handling
  • Custom API integration
  • DynamoDB (NoSQL) database design
  • Designed with scalability in mind

What we learned

  • To avoid user sign-in as it is too complicated to set up within the time limit of the competition
  • better separation of tasks for everyone utilize everyone's time

What's next for MatchEd

Feature Improvement:

  • UI/UX improvements
  • More data points used for matching
  • Improved matching algorithm
  • Abuse protections (improved security)
  • Ethical considerations (priority matching, religion matching, etc.)

Monetization program by charging organizations (not individuals) to build custom solutions. Potential monetized programs could include:

  • University student mentors matched with high schoolers based on similar backgrounds and interests
  • Large corporations matching junior and senior employees to foster inspiration
Share this project:

Updates