Inspiration
Applying to US colleges is overwhelming. Students juggle dozens of schools, scholarship deadlines, essays, and SOPs -- often without guidance. We wanted to build an AI system where you just talk naturally and a team of specialist agents handles everything for you.
What it does
Rise is a network of 10 specialist AI agents built on Fetch.ai's uAgents framework, coordinated by a journey orchestrator. Each agent is an expert in one part of the application process:
- 🏫 College Finder -- Searches the US Dept. of Education's College Scorecard API in real time. Returns actual admission rates, tuition costs, and website links for thousands of universities, classified as reach/target/safety.
- 💰 Scholarship Scout -- Uses Gemini AI to discover real scholarships tailored to the student's major and degree level, with deadlines, amounts, and application links.
- 📝 SOP Strategist -- Generates personalized Statement of Purpose strategy outlines with central themes, opening hooks, and program fit strategies using Gemini AI.
- ✍️ Essay Writer -- Drafts unique application essays for any prompt, personalized with the student's name, major, and background. Every essay is different.
- ✨ Essay Polisher -- Refines drafts for clarity, flow, and word count using AI-powered editing.
- 📅 Application Planner -- Builds step-by-step timelines with deadlines and checklists.
- 🛡️ Compliance Guard -- Ensures no unauthorized auto-submissions happen -- copilot only.
- 🎓 Profile Builder -- Extracts student info from natural language ("Im Aditya, studying CS, 3.8 GPA, 50k budget").
The Journey Orchestrator ties them all together. It detects user intent from natural language, routes to the right specialist, maintains session memory across messages, and presents formatted results with emojis, links, and actionable next steps.
How we built it
- Fetch.ai uAgents Framework -- All 10 agents are built as uAgents with the Agent Chat Protocol (ACP), deployed as hosted agents on Agentverse.
- US College Scorecard API -- Free, real-time government data for college search. No API key needed. Returns actual tuition, admission rates, and school URLs for every accredited US institution.
- Google Gemini API -- Powers scholarship discovery, essay writing, SOP generation, and essay polishing. Each response is unique and tailored to the student's profile.
- ASI:One Chat -- The primary interface. Judges and users interact with agents through natural conversation.
- Session Memory -- The orchestrator persists user profiles across messages using
ctx.storage, so you share your info once and it remembers.
Challenges we ran into
- ASI:One chat renders markdown differently than expected -- single newlines collapse into one line, requiring double newlines for proper formatting.
- Intent detection edge cases: "help me find scholarships" was triggering the help screen instead of the scholarship search because "help" was a substring match.
- Gemini free tier rate limits during testing -- solved by adding retry logic with model fallback (flash-lite -> flash).
- The hosted agent code runs as standalone Python on Agentverse, so all formatting, regex, and API calls had to work without external dependencies.
Accomplishments we're proud of
- Zero hardcoded data -- Every college result comes from a live government API. Every scholarship, essay, and SOP is generated fresh by AI. Nothing is static.
- 10 agents that work both standalone and orchestrated -- Each agent has its own personality, greeting, and formatted output. Users can talk to any of them directly.
- Natural language understanding -- "Im Aditya, studying ML, 3.9 GPA, 50k budget" just works. No forms, no structured input required.
- 103 passing tests -- Comprehensive test suite covering all agent code generation, deployment, and response formatting.
What we learned
- Building for a chat-first interface (ASI:One) is fundamentally different from building a web app -- every response needs to be self-contained, formatted, and actionable.
- Multi-agent architectures shine when each agent has a clear, narrow responsibility and the orchestrator handles routing and context.
- Free government APIs (College Scorecard) are surprisingly powerful and reliable for hackathon projects.
What's next for Rise
- Add real-time scholarship deadline tracking with push notifications via Agentverse scheduling.
- Integrate with university-specific APIs for program-level data (faculty, research areas, funding).
- Add a document upload agent for transcript and resume parsing.
- Enable agent-to-agent delegation on the ASI:One network so the orchestrator can discover and invoke third-party agents.
Links to all the agents: https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1qfcuwez3dkyrq7ewzwvw06qaswf6el5nap23vud29ex9zjen0hfcvhchqy9/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1qvhs7e3ksgs032z4rry0657zhkw3m9lpvw8q3q7pdkdxwp8k03aax2g7x8v/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1qw56kq7xpz5zfnaj25x8y0rmpk874drefh0ncxmgt3drw5a3sq2l7554g5s/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1q0nhtrtaa4ee6w9vqjguud03n8gz3a3ur0289jvq5wv7vx6k5zhq7ecdw64/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1qt5fc4sjhuysyaaf05vaevvr69n0zuzz87p64qz35rd5770u6pwkxeplw9h/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1qt8xelcntut2k8pyzl6m0pm5uea3advfag83v434ee7m6lugvnd7sygkk92/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1qtjkg95pljwzptwd2sjwdwzjayj033t88r5aseqpclg3wvyhmh7f2mzmz29/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1q0gcga6q4wzv0v0laatkrmd7h0gmsrreeulm4fad894vjx5lqk5pq25fdpg/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1q0p8f257q4cdsfk704g3tkmskrg63nn257r8ycq4zpc5qpsv7k2ug4q985s/profile https://agentverse.ai/agents/details/agent1q2kt0j5rk8v6jxcgg9tttgaetcrdc36x6xuc9swev5rwwqqhs57gs7yz0nn/profile
Chat Link: https://asi1.ai/shared-chat/8c6df23b-3a2c-465e-b21d-fe00483d5ebc
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