Inspiration
As students, we are c o n s t a n t l y looking for research opportunities and ways to further our learning. However, we have learned that it can be quite difficult to find these opportunities because it usually is poorly formatted on websites and not explicitly mentioned anywhere. We have to do a lot of digging and emailing to understand what professors are working on.
According to the National Science Board (NSB), for a long time, academic institutions have been responsible for performing about 10% to 15% of the total U.S. research and development, which includes half of U.S. basic research. Since, colleges play such an important role in the research field, it is important that action is taken to facilitate the process of students and professors conducting research.
That is why for HackViolet 2023, we created Occuper! A platform for people to post and look for research opportunities in Blacksburg. It allows professors and researchers to post for more members to join their lab as well as get user study participants.
What it does
Our website functions as a job search portal but for research opportunities. It include listings of each research opportunity posted by faculty and researchers. Then, bachelors, masters and phd students can use this website to join their lab and work on research areas they would be interested in. Any students interested in research can look at all the opportunities available in Blacksburg related to a field they want to work in and once they have found something that piques their interest, they can reach out to the professor / researcher directly.
How we built it
- MongoDB, Express, React, Node (MERN - next.js framework) stack deployed on Vercel with Auth0 authentication system.
- We are using Google Cloud storage for storing images posted by the user.
- We used the domain we redeemed from domain.com
- Layout of the website was created with html, css, and javascript
Challenges we ran into
All of the components work but we were not able to merge the backend and frontend :(
Since we wanted to create an authentication step, which would make it so only Virginia Tech students or staff could post, we had to do a lot of research on how to implement this feature. It was pretty new to us so unlike some of the other steps, this one took quite a long time.
Additionally, it was often hard to collaborate with such a large group because it was difficult to have more than one person work on a given task. Thus, we had to think hard about how work would be divided to best match our skill set.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
To have a FINISHED product is arguably one of the best feelings in the world. Despite some of our challenges, we were able to move past them. I am proud the website looks aesthetically pleasing and cannot believe we were able to accomplish so much in such little time.
What we learned
All of us can easily attest that we learned so much during this process. Although we are CS majors for the most part, our areas of interest and specialty differ greatly. Thus, this allows us to learn a lot from each other and be able to expand our repertoire of software and skills.
What's next for Occuper
If we can work hard to add more additions to the website, we were thinking we could approach some of the departments at Virginia Tech with this idea! Research is super important and now more than ever it will be so easy for people to be a part of something AMAZING.
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