MentorMe

Inspiration

It's easy to feel discouraged as a female in STEM when you are often surrounded by only men with few females to look up to as role models or mentors. We are all a part of the ACES Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park and as part of this program we receive the opportunity to be paired with professionals in cybersecurity from various companies and organizations. This mentorship helps us remain interested and receive the support we need to excel in this field. We wanted to create a social media app that could help create this kind of experience for women in STEM.

What it does

The app helps connect professionals in the field to current middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students looking to pursue a STEM profession. It would recommend mentors to the students based on their interests. There would be a chat feature where students can ask advice from their mentors or have group chats where they talk about their experiences. This would help the girls feel connected and less alone. We wanted to add a feature where there would be a map that mentors could add events to as a way to notify their mentees of STEM events going on. Then, at the events the mentees could check in using the MicroStrategy Usher platform. That could help them find other girls with similar interests as themselves at the event and form networks of support amongst themselves.

How we built it

We built it using Android Studio. We wanted to include MicroStrategy Usher, and Here.com but ran into difficulties integrating them into our project. Using Android Studio we managed to create a login page where users can login and register.

Challenges we ran into

Issues receiving a license for Usher in order to integrate it with our app. We also ran into trouble with Android Studio due to bugs in the current version of Android Studio. There were also difficulties in getting the map to load properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a first time hacker I am proud that I managed to start learn a new program and start working with it in a single day. As a team we're proud of our idea, even if we couldn't finish implementing it we hope it will be one day. We're also proud of our ability to come together as a team and create something, despite it not being what we originally set out for.

What we learned

We learned about integrating different SDKs and connecting our app to third-party applications. We learned how to set up a database of users and authentication using firebase on android studio. It was especially helpful that there was a workshop specifically for firebase. We learned how to begin the setup for MicroStrategy Usher and how it works.

What's next for MentorMe

We would like to continue with this project and make it into a full blown social media network to help connect women in STEM everywhere. We would like to have a fully implemented algorithm for pairing up mentors and mentees. We think this would be a great way to make sure women feel like they're not alone and that they have someone to look up to in their field of interest.

Built With

• android-studio
• microstrategy