Scholarly

Millions can't access higher education due to socio-economic barriers. Scholarly scrapes the web and finds tailored scholarships globally, empowering talented minds in achieving their dreams

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Inspiration

We came to realisation that there are many things we take for granted, education being one of them. There are so many smart and talented people out there who wish they could pursue higher education but their current circumstances don't allow that. Scholarships are a great tool to bridge this gap, however it's super difficult for students to find scholarships, they may have to browse for hours on many different websites just to find ones they're eligible for, surely this could be simplified. Also, there are not that many sources to find scholarships in the UK compared to the US, hence we tried to simplify searching for scholarships in the US

What it does

Scholarly is a web application that allows users to input personal information in seconds and makes use of modern web scraping techniques to find scholarship opportunities tailor made for them

How we built it

We delegated the task between the three of us, David built the front end of the application using React and Austin built the backend using node.js, Armaan did the web scraping (something he's never done before) using urllib and request. The communication between us was immaculate and that's the main thing that got us with a MVP so quickly.

Challenges we ran into

We kept debating ideas and pivoting from one thing to the other, we only started properly building and committing to this idea at around 6pm on Saturday. This was quite late, hence we were tight on time when building this platform. We fixed this by having some caffeine and sacrificing a bit of sleep, we don't regret it at all! :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a solution that actually solves a problem that needs to be solved, this was very nice to work on as the platform helps people! This was the first hackathon for 2 of us, and we had a first year student on our team who learnt web scraping from scratch and implemented a script to find the scholarships. Despite us not having worked in a team that much, I think we worked nicely in harmony.

What we learnt

It's difficult to come up with ideas from scratch, find problems you face in your everyday life and try to find solutions for those, you should also try to put yourself in the future and think about things that would seem very odd now but normal in the future. We learnt that you shouldn't overthink the ideas too much as it can waste a lot of valuable building time. Also, we learnt that you can take something from '0 to 1' so quickly if you work with other amazing people!

What's next for Scholarly

At the moment, we are only scraping for scholarships in the UK and the US, in the future we would like to implement more web scraping functionality that looks for scholarships in more countries. Also we would like to implement a function that calculates the likelihood (as a percentage) of you getting approved for that scholarship based on your answers so that it gives students a better idea of their odds. We also want to implement a function for companies to add their own scholarships manually instead of scraping them from the web.

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