PathLink — Your Personalized Academic Guide

We built PathLink because choosing college courses often feels like a guessing game. We’ve all struggled with picking the right mix of classes that fit our goals, schedules, and energy levels — and we thought, what if it could be as easy as having a conversation? PathLink is an intelligent course recommendation app that lets students simply type what they’re looking for — whether that’s “I’m part-time with 20 hours a week, looking for Spring design courses” or “I want to become a data scientist” — and it responds with curated course suggestions that actually make sense. Behind the scenes, we used MongoDB to store course data, OpenAI’s embedding model to understand content and intent, FAISS for fast semantic matching, FastAPI to tie everything together, and React to build an intuitive chatbot interface. We learned a ton — especially how to use large language models in a practical, structured way. Most importantly, we learned how to build something that could genuinely help students feel more confident in the paths they choose.