Scholar Ninja

Find the best scholarships with a click of a button.

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Inspiration

During the 2020-2021 college application cycle, a friend kept track of their college apps and financial aid docs using a spreadsheet document. It had over 70 columns detailing scholarships and colleges, their essays and revision details, whether they’ve submitted a portfolio, financial documents, and so on. This single spreadsheet took months of work — and from the 60 colleges they applied to, they ended up with a grand total of 2 realistic choices.
 All that time and effort is something that not every student is able to afford, especially from those that come from similar backgrounds as this friend and our team (low-income, first generational international students), except Richard who is a US citizen. In the past few years, I (Desmond) have been directly involved with many communities that struggle to access education — something that me and my team intimately know.  Through those encounters and our personal experiences, we learned that **the scholarship search process is a headache!**

What it does

To address the challenges we’ve identified, we've built Scholar Ninja. This revolutionary scholarship resource platform empowers students to find scholarships efficiently, so they can focus on what truly matters - **their academic and personal growth.**
Our platform leverages AI (chatGPT) to extract scholarship data from a user-provided scholarship website. Once the data is collected, Scholar Ninja works magic by automatically organizing the information into a centralized database. The result? An easily accessible and efficiently sortable spreadsheet of scholarships, displaying columns such as scholarship names, awards, US citizenship eligibility requirements, and deadlines. **With just a few clicks, students can now find scholarships that match their criteria without the headache of digging through paragraphs of text.**
 Oh, and here's the best part – no more wasted time discovering you're ineligible to apply due to citizenship requirements. **On Scholar Ninja, you only view scholarships you're eligible for.**

How we built it

All put together, Scholar Ninja is, currently, a mobile app. We used the Expo Go framework to build this app. Meaning, our entire UI was built on the React-Native library. We used React Navigation library to handle the routing in this app. We then used flask to build the backend. We used ScraperBee to handle the web scraping, which outputs JSON file, which were fed to GPT api to handle the organization of the information regarding scholarships.

Challenges we ran into

We had some difficulty with web scraping as requests were failing to authorize POST and GET requests. However, we were able to find a library called ScraperBee that let us simply make a request with a URL to get data, like scholarship name and description.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a group, we're proud to have supported each other  in our own special ways through this hackathon. We are super excited by the educational access that Scholar Ninja is about giving the students that needed it most! Individually, we obviously empowered by the new technologies we have learned during this weekend

What we learned

  1. Expo Go (React Native Framework)
  2. Flask
  3. Firebase
  4. ScraperBee
  5. ChatGPT API
  6. React Navigation
  7. React Vector Icons

What's next for Scholar Ninja

We believe there’s so much more potential waiting to be unlocked. In the future, we hope to:

  1. build an administrative dashboard that allows college counselors — for example, those in college access programs or are independent — to view high-level data of their students. How many scholarships are in progress, total funding awarded, which students tend towards what types of scholarships.

  2. include a centralized application hub where students can fill out their forms once and submit to as many scholarships as they’d like, similar to the Common App—but for scholarships!

  3. **launch with pilot groups of students and administrators

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