Scholar Link AI

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  Central hub showing scholarships found, eligible matches, upcoming deadlines, AI recommendations, and deadline alerts at a glance.

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  Browse and filter scholarships by income, category, domicile & match status. View amount, deadline, and match score on each card

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  Students enter academic, financial & category details. Clicking Save Profile instantly computes personalized scholarship matches.

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  AI chat that answers queries on scholarships, documents, deadlines & essays with quick prompts for instant guidance and support.

ScholarLink AI Inspiration Every year, thousands of students miss scholarship opportunities due to scattered information, complex eligibility requirements, and missed application deadlines. We recognized this challenge and set out to build a platform that simplifies scholarship discovery and empowers students to access educational funding more easily. What it does ScholarLink AI is an AI-powered scholarship recommendation platform that helps students discover scholarships tailored to their profiles. Students provide information such as:

Course or field of study Academic performance Income category Location Educational background

The platform then:

Matches students with relevant scholarships Verifies eligibility criteria Tracks application deadlines Provides personalized recommendations Simplifies the scholarship search process

Our mission is to ensure that no deserving student misses an opportunity due to lack of information. How we built it We developed ScholarLink AI using a straightforward and effective full-stack architecture: Frontend

HTML5 CSS3 JavaScript (Vanilla) Tailwind CSS

Backend

Node.js Express.js

Database

MySQL hosted on Aiven Cloud

Deployment

Frontend and Backend deployed on Render Database deployed on Aiven

Development Tools

Git GitHub

The core of the platform is an intelligent eligibility-matching engine that compares a student's profile against scholarship requirements and recommends the most suitable opportunities. The frontend is built entirely with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Tailwind CSS — keeping the stack lightweight, fast, and accessible without the overhead of a frontend framework. System Architecture User ↓ Frontend (HTML + Tailwind CSS + JS on Render) ↓ Backend API (Node.js + Express on Render) ↓ MySQL Database (Aiven Cloud)

Challenges we ran into

Collecting and organizing scholarship data from multiple sources. Designing a clean and user-friendly interface using pure HTML, CSS, and Tailwind CSS without a frontend framework. Building an accurate eligibility recommendation engine. Managing deadlines and personalized student information efficiently. Integrating cloud deployment across Render and Aiven.

What we learned Through this project, we gained valuable experience in:

Full-stack web development using vanilla JavaScript and Node.js. Building dynamic, responsive UIs without a frontend framework using Tailwind CSS. Cloud deployment using Render and Aiven. Database design and management with MySQL. Building recommendation and filtering systems. Developing scalable and user-centric applications.

Future Plans

AI chatbot for scholarship guidance. Email and SMS deadline reminders. Integration with government scholarship portals. Advanced AI-based recommendation algorithms. Analytics dashboard for tracking applications and scholarship success rates. Migration to a component-based frontend framework for improved scalability.

Impact ScholarLink AI helps students save time, discover hidden opportunities, and make informed decisions about educational funding. By centralizing scholarship information and providing personalized recommendations, we aim to make education more accessible and equitable for all students. Our vision is simple:

"No deserving student should miss a scholarship opportunity."

Built With

• aiven
• css3
• express.js
• github
• html5
• javascript
• mysql
• node.js
• render
• tailwindcss