Pineapple Pathways

Admission Stats Page
Output of pairing system
Tuition Page
Essay help page
Scholarship pairing system
Landing Page

Inspiration

Being surrounded by many high - school and university students, along with two of ourselves applying to universities this September, we wanted to create an all in one tool to help students navigate the complex world of university applications. We wanted to create a one stop place where students can improve their university applications and gain access to scholarships to benefit them on their future journey. We recalled how over 20 million dollars worth of scholarship money goes unclaimed in Canada each year and given many struggle with the weight of tuition one of our key functionalities is a sponsorship database ensuring that students are able to get all the money they can to support their future. In short, applying to university is not an easy task, quite the opposite and with so many resources spread out sparsely, we wanted to create an all in one tool to empower students with their journey towards the future.

What it does

Our platform offers personalized advice, step-by-step application guidance, scholarship matching, and tips for acing interviews and essays. Whether you're aiming for top universities or seeking financial aid, Scholar Rank is here to make your journey smoother, helping you achieve your academic dreams with confidence. Firstly, our scholarship database search allows you to find scholarships that are specifically relevant to you, your aspirations and characteristics that best allows you to claim them. With over 500 scholarships you will find a plethora of awards that you can apply to in order to secure your future. With our essay helper we provide in - depth feedback to your short - answers and essays to ensure you communicate yourself in the best way possible. Powered with AI our platform ensures you create the strongest essay possible. Finally, with our tuition calculator and stats predictor you can calculate the tuition needed for your desired program to begin your budgeting plans and see your chances of admission at different programs to enable you to create a comprehensive plan to achieving a successful future for you.

How we built it

Backend - Scholarships: We utilized python and Flask for the backend development of our various applications. For our sponsorship database we compiled a spreadsheet with 500+ scholarships. The user would enter information about themselves on the frontend and through a Post request that information would be sent to the flask server as a JSON file. The server captures the JSON file and retrieves the users input information. We then use the Cohere API to rank the scholarships based on the users query and parameters. We then extract the top 12 of these recommendations and return that back to the front end to be displayed. This is our favorite feature!

Backend - Essay Helper: We trained a custom chat GPT model to be able to respond to user inputs, and provide detailed tips on how to improve. This was a very tedious task, requiring us to communicate between a flask server to the chat GPT API to the react frontend.

Backend - Stats: This was by far the most annoying feature to get to work. We had to download a ton of university statistics as excel files, convert those to csv files, and process them into our application.

Backend - Tuition: We again utilized Flask and Python to use the user input information about their tuition and university to create a post request that is sent to the flask server. We then compare the parameters of the users input with our compiled dataset of tuition costs for various programs from various universities and output an approximate tuition cost.

Frontend - Landing Page I stood up all night on Friday night making this webpage. (Mostly because I wasn't satisfied with the result!) I feel like every website these days is a carbon copy of the same cooperate template. It was a lot of fun to experiment with a more brutalist design to create a super eye-catching landing page. We used react, but we did not do any smooth animations as we were going for a raw feeling.

Frontend - Dashboard We wanted to maintain the same minimalistic feeling as the landing page. I really like how "bare bones" it looks but it's still a complex react object.

Challenges we ran into

This was all of our first time using flask for the backend processing so there was a lot we were unfamiliar with and a lot of experimenting we had to do to get familiar with the framework. Specifically, we found it challenging to send specific user inputs or actions into the server including checkboxes and drop down menus. We also faced challenges in the tuition page in trying to compare the existing dataset with the user input but we were able to solve these problems through innovative design choices. Finally, our largest challenge was definitely hosting our webpage. Since we created a dynamic webpage that would make requests to the flask server we could not use a static host such as GitHub pages which we were not expecting. We had to scour the web for a site that would allow us to host our site and even then we faced many challenges in running the scripts to host the server. Eventually, after a lot and a lot of debugging we were able to successfully host the site on the Vercell server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this is our first time working with the ChatGPT API and Cohere Rerank, we are very proud of the results. The final product exceeds our expectations as the Cohere Rerank worked way better than we expected. The scholarship ranking was incredibly consistent and relevant to the information provided by the user. Finally, the UI is very clean and polished and it was very cool to experiment with different website styles.

What we learned

Every member of our team tried something new for the first time. We learned and implemented Flask, OpenAI API, Cohere Rerank, React, Webscraping, and Database Management. While we all had a basic understanding of these technologies, this project allowed us to explore even further, and most importantly, connect everything into one big project.

What's next for Pineapple Pathways

As technology improves, we would like to use the newest AI models to improve Pineapple Pathways' abilities. We would also like to expand our scholarship dataset using web scraping and databasing tools. Additionally, we'd like to improve the university application section of the website by providing stats about more universities. To do this, we would need to collect more accurate data about various universities. Finally we would like to purchase a domain and host our site on a reliable server. Currently we host it on a free plan server and so when other people try to access it, it can be unreliable and since we want it to be accessible to the world not just as a local host we are planning on purchasing a dedicated domain to host our site effectively.