Scholar-ships.com

Graduate debt free: serve your community and fund your tuition

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Inspiration

I decided to start a second hacktx project after scoring well on a Kaggle NLP competition that I planned to do for the duration of the hackathon. The idea for Scholar-ships.com came to me around 3:30am which was quite unfortunate for my sleep schedule. Nevertheless I still had a great time developing the prototype for this last minute hackathon project!

What it does

The average US college graduate in 2016 had $37,172 in debt. Scholar-ships.com is a social engagement platform for students to create an account to document their journey to pursue higher education and for sponsors to pledge donations to students looking to raise funds for tuition. The current version implemented a view of the student's profile page and donor's page.

My vision for the project is that donors will be able to post 'service opportunities' for the student to complete in order to receive a cash match into their college fund. The funds available starting the semester the student begins to apply for colleges and students can be only the platform from grades 9-12. Examples of these service opportunities are tutoring, coaching, nannying, graphic design IT, web development, etc. It is with the best intention that the nature of these jobs should leverage the student's interpersonal, technical, and leadership skills to be a stronger candidate for college admissions and beyond. However, other odd jobs may include house painting, moving, lawn mowing, baby sitting, dog walking, etc. The student can use the platform to continue to engage with his or her sponsors and notify them which academic expenses the funds are covering.

How I built it

Flask, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Azure

Challenges I ran into

I am unfamiliar with front-end web development and so this was definitely a bottleneck in the development process for me. I had to look up even the most basic html tags that's all part of the learning process!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Believe it or not, this is my very first all nighter! In life, in college, ever.

What I learned

I tend to use what ever cloud computing platform gives me free credits at the time, I have not used Microsoft's for a while even though I signed full time for Azure this month...

What's next for Scholar-ships.com

Register it under its domain and host on Microsoft Azure

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