Inspiration
We as a team realized that something we are all fortunate to have is a network of people in industry or at school that we can rely on to provide us with advice when we need it. There are many opportunities both provided by our respective universities and by our families to have mentors should we need it. This is not true of many people in other communities. Because we are fortunate enough to go to college and to have families with industries connections we tend to take it for granted. In other communities, both locally and globally, students don't have the resources to gain the information or support they need, whether professionally or emotionally. So we decided to make this webapp to provide students with the opportunity to link with mentors that can give them advice in life and work.
What it does
Ideally, this webapp will take data the user inputs via some clickable options we provide on the page, and then after they click the submit button, all mentors that match their field of interest, sex, name and bio description will appear on the page. Their contact info will appear which will give the mentee the opportunity to contact them to set up a meeting or call at anytime that is convenient to both of them.
How we built it
Challenges we ran into
We wrote about half of the back-end of the website in php before we realized that a lot of the functionality that we wanted could be written in sql, in much less time. Other challenges involved teaching ourselves how to make forms in html, which required a lot of Google searches. We also realized soon into researching sql and storing data that time would be an issue, so we decided to store data (the mentor/mentee info from the form) onto a locally hosted excel document.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the new things we learned and how to deal with problems and a lot of stress. We confronted our problems and didn't let them overwhelm us, which is an accomplishment on our part.
What's next for Mentor Me
A lot could be added this webapp, it terms of beautifying the css/html to make it more aesthetically pleasing, and work on storing user data in a database so that this could be an ever growing community. We could add photos, more specification for matching, and use the match-linking api from microsoft to advance our matching algorithm.
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