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Sprout aims to squash imposter syndrome among underrepresented genders in tech!
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Mentor-mentee matching form which implements recommender system to arrange pairs.
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First-time home purchase form aimed at informing young buyers of strategies to improve their loan prospects and increase financial literacy.
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Section of mentor page with carousel of advice and encouragement for mentors.
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Internship opportunities for college students aimed at squashing imposter syndrome and amplifying representation.
Inspiration 🌱
Sprout (Supporting Professionals in Reaching Our Underrepresented Talents) was created with the intention of fostering a tight-knit community among underrepresented people of the technology industry. Surpassing differences in age, job experience, and life standing, Sprout aims to squash impostor syndrome among college grads by empowering them with the financial literacy and professional confidence to carry them throughout their early adulthood. In connecting established industry professionals with emerging technologists, we aim to provide mentors and retired professionals with opportunities to engage in the field through awareness of part time roles within the industry.
What it does 🌱
Our interactive website provides a visual experience for mentors and mentees alike to gain relevant information about financial technology and professional development. The website provides mentees with 1) financial literacy advice, 2) an early housing loan approval calculator with customized advice, and 3) job opportunities with regard to encouraging underrepresented, yet qualified applicants to apply with confidence.
Mentors are provided with 1) literature regarding the importance of mentorship in the tech industry and personalized current news in tech and 2) curated, part-time job opportunities that encourage them to engage with professional circles to foster mentorship.
Our mentor-mentee matching page acts as a Tinder-style matching system whereby both parties can fill out a personality test to best recommend a match. The algorithm then assigns pairs based upon a mutual selection.
How we built it 🌱
We implemented React, CSS, and Javascript to develop the frontend for the webpages. To create the website graphics, we designed and exported components from Procreate. Our backend tools to process user input into the forms and to evaluate algorithmic output included Flask and MongoDB. We used Twilio to email users a copy of their mentor-mentee match. Finally, we used CloudFlare and Heroku to deploy our web app to the Internet.
Challenges we ran into 🌱
Establishing our code workflow using Git for version control was tricky to set up, but the process of collaborating became more familiar throughout the hackathon. This project was a rewarding process of learning whereby we got to learn new technology features on the go, which proved to be challenging, yet energizing.
Accomplishments that we're proud of 🌱
We're proud that we developed and deployed a website built from ground up. Our skills as a team complemented each others well where we were able to lean on each other's respective skills to build an awesome hack. We are most of all proud that we developed a hack to champion voices of underrepresented demographics within the tech industry, and that we could draw upon our personal experiences to uplift and encourage a community of hackers and technologists.
What we learned 🌱
Our project, Sprout, was a great process of learning for all team members, where we gained greater experience in utilizing backend tools to create an interactive webpage (Flask and MongoDB) and front end tools to better UI/UX features (React).
What's next for sprout 🌱
We intend to expand the functionality of our mentor-mentee matching survey through implementing a built in system to set time-bound goals and to facilitate a process of reapplication. As such, we hope to forge stronger, meaningful, long-lasting connections between mentors and mentees. Further, we aim to extrapolate a personal experiences section within our survey to allow for greater personal connection in these relationships.
Further, based upon these inputted interests and desires, we intend to implement a web-scraper to scrape for relevant tech/industry related current events to promote the excellence of underrepresented groups in technology.
We intend to create more specific fields in the mentee internship application to curate search findings to place people in a the appropriate environment for them, as feeling included, welcome, and comfortable to contribute is of utmost importance.
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