RuThere

RuThere is an AI copilot for students that scores every campus event against your goals, tracks referrals, and turns networking into measurable progress toward a job.

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Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for RuThere

Inspiration Most students at Rutgers show up to events randomly, collect a few LinkedIn connections, and leave with nothing to show for it. We wanted to build something that actually connects campus activity to real outcomes — jobs, referrals, and community — not just attendance for attendance's sake. What it does RuThere is an AI-powered campus platform that turns events into measurable progress. Students set goals through a structured AI Copilot, get a relevance score for every campus event, see a color-coded live map, track referrals and connections, and receive AI-drafted outreach to follow up with people they meet. How we built it We built RuThere with FastAPI and SQLAlchemy on the backend, React Native with Expo on mobile, and Azure OpenAI (GPT-4.1) powering the Copilot and event scoring. Zustand handles client state, React Query manages server sync, and we used SQLite for dev with a PostgreSQL migration path for production. Challenges we ran into Designing the goal questionnaire to feel structured but not robotic was harder than expected. Getting event relevance scoring to be meaningful across different goal types — career vs. social vs. exploratory — required a lot of iteration on the weighting system. Accomplishments that we're proud of The AI Copilot flow that takes a student from zero context to a fully quantified 3-month plan in under 2 minutes. Also the event weightage system that dynamically scores each event's contribution toward referral, connection, and attendance milestones. What we learned Goal-setting UX is really hard. Students don't think in milestones — they think in feelings. Translating "I want a job" into "15 referrals, 10 career events, 20 connections" required designing the questionnaire to do that translation invisibly. What's next for RuThere Live campus map with real-time friend presence, alumni database integration for richer connection suggestions, and an org-facing analytics dashboard so career centers and student clubs can see engagement data and optimize their events.

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