Researchify

Introducing "Researchify" – the ultimate web app revolutionizing the way students discover and connect with UCI professors' research!

Comment

Inspiration

We were inspired by a desire to simplify the often complex process of exploring academic work. It's about making it easier for students and researchers to connect with professors, fostering collaborations, and breaking down barriers to accessing diverse research projects. The goal is to provide a user-friendly platform that helps users navigate the vast academic landscape, find relevant research based on specific interests, and promote interdisciplinary learning.

What it does

Our application searches through the database of research made and published by UCI professors. It filters between the departments to allow the user to see only the research of a specific department's professors. Once the user selects the department they want, they can add the professors they like to their list/favorites for later viewing.

How we built it

We built our web app using a combination of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap for the front end, Node.js for the backend, MongoDB as our database, and Cheerio for web scraping. We initially went through many ideas ranging from a hardware/IOT project to a simple QR code app. We were planning on incorporating React into our front-end but in the end, went against it due to our inexperience.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was with using Git as we commonly ran into problems with our pushes and pulls not showing up both locally and remotely on our GitHub repository. Likewise, we had a rather difficult time doing the web scraping as it is not something that we usually do, leading us to have problems ranging from writing the data retrieval prompts to figuring out how to read the dynamic data of our source.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to endure the process of writing this application as well as having a mostly working project.

What we learned

We learned that web development is quite a difficult task to do, but having a team to work through it with makes the process a much less grueling experience.

What's next for Researchify

  1. Create a login portal for both students and professors. Professors will be able to post research openings and customize their application process.
  2. Create a messaging feature between professors and students
  3. Create some sort of AI chatbot system to assist students should they have any questions regarding the application.
Share this project:

Updates