PrePair

A community-based mentorship platform that connects college STEM students with volunteer mentors with substantial experience in the industries they aspire to work in through the use of technology.

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Inspiration

Due to my own experiences as a first-generation college student in STEM, I realized how challenging it can be to find quality mentorship and guidance during college and afterward. Therefore, my colleague and I designed an online platform that we hope will help students navigate the challenges of college and prepare them for a career that they love.

What it does

PrePair is an online platform that leverages the power of technology to connect students and volunteer mentors. PrePair's mission is to make mentorship and career guidance widely available for STEM students in college especially first-generation students and students from marginalized communities.

How we built it

PrePair web application is built with HTML, CSS, MongoDB, Express, and Node.js. We used Figma, HTML, CSS, and bootstrap to design and build the user interface. In our application, the mentors and students have differently designed interfaces. We store both students' and mentors' information in MongoDB, and through the use of Node/Express, we use this information to connect students with mentors. We use filters such as mentors' job roles and educational backgrounds to recommend them to students in similar disciplines.

Challenges we ran into

  • One of the biggest challenges we ran into is not having enough time to finish all of the functionalities we wished the application to have.
  • Some of the technologies we used, we had to learn which took more time than anticipated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We are proud of the easy-to-use and sleek user interface we designed and build, which we hope will improve the user experience on the app.
  • We are proud that even though we are both full-time students with busy schedules we were able to build a semi-fully functional application in the short time we had.
  • Even though we were unable to finish the in-app messaging on the client side, we are proud that we finished the database design and backend for it, and we have fully functional endpoints that we will be using to finish this feature in the future.

What we learned

  • We learned the importance of user-experience-driven web design.
  • Through this project, we learned how to collaborate with each other through GitHub's version control.
  • learned new technologies and tools such as Figma, Mongoose, MongoDB, and NodeJS.

What's next for PrePair

  • Implementing in-app messaging feature and push notifications.
  • Adding a filter for students and mentors to choose if they wish to meet mentor/mentee online or in-person.
  • integrating geolocation APIs to connect students to nearby mentors if they wish to meet in person.
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