Inspiration
Historically Research Experience for Undergrads (REU's) have targeted many underrepresented groups in academia. In order to bring research opportunities that they might not have access to at their home institution. However this is a contradiction, because the information is haphazardly scattered across the internet. Considering our passion for our community and learning outside the classroom we both decided that this would be the perfect idea for our project. We also both strongly believe technology does have the ability to benefit our community when creative minds collaborate to reach a common goal.
What it does
The program complies Mathematics REU Program data from a variety of sources conveniently making it visible to the user in a one-stop format. This information includes things like the Universities/Institution name, location information (state, city), subject area, program link, application link, and a start to end date, and the deadline to apply. This is essentially a one stop shop for underrepresented groups in STEM. Future additions include but are not limited to, making a user-friendly website with options to filter data, more data sources, and scaling this to other subject area REUs (i.e. chemistry, biology, etc)
How we built it
We used python, beautiful soup, GitHub WorkFlows to create our project.
Challenges we ran into
Both members are novices, but one didn't have any prior experience programming in python, so using techniques like web scraping and modules like beautiful soup was not only new information, but challenging to use throughout the structure.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Producing quality work was one of our goals coming into the event especially since this was our first Hackathon. We both confidently Also both teammates worked about 23/24 hours programming the project. It did feel difficult at times, but also felt very rewarding. Both teammate's haven't ever p participated in hackathon before, so we are very proud and excited to present our work.
What we learned
Our team learned a lot during this competition since this is our first hackathon. Also one member now has a decent understanding of python, beautiful soup, and web scraping even though he started the hackathon without any prior knowledge of this stack. He also learned a lot about the REU process and opportunities that other universities offer. The other member became more comfortable using GitHub Workflow.
What's next for Research Experience for Undergraduates Programs
We would like to implement an actual website instead of a GitHub page, duplicate entries and adding other majors as well, so all college students can benefit from our program.
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