StepUp

Inspiration

As students, we understand the struggle of trying to find good resources for opportunities and scholarships, especially doing covid. Scholarships especially are crucial as the average student loan borrower graduates with $29,400 in student loan debt, and the nation’s total student debt load passed $1 trillion for the first time last year. As well, these opportunities, like research and internships, can help a student drastically when applying for universities. Even afterwards, the opportunities are still valuable to a student’s education. Unfortunately, these opportunities and scholarships are often extremely hard to find and students often have to spend hours looking for them. So we wanted to create this website to make it easier for students anywhere to find these resources.

What it does

StepUp allows students to find scholarships, awards, internships, research opportunities and other opportunities all in one website. All the resources are listed with a short description, a link to more information, a bookmark to save for later and tags to categorize each opportunity to a location, subject and type. As well, if the student signs up and creates an account, they can be matched to specific resources that relate to their location, interests, grade and gender. This allows to student to have a more personalized experience, and makes it even easier to find resources.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS and Javascript using Qoom. As well, to learn how to make the login system, we followed the Qoom tutorial.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some problems using Qoom since this was the first time we had used it before. As well, because of the beta collab feature, we ran into some issues with glitches, which was a challenge, but we did still manage to finish! Furthermore, learning how to make the login and signup features was difficult, but we managed to implement it and make it work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of finishing the project on time even after all the glitches and issues. Overall, we’re very proud of our final product and being able to complete it!

What we learned

We learned a lot in this process, about designing a visually appealing website, making the sign-up system, etc, as well as working effectively in a team.

What's next for StepUp

In the future, we want to actually implement the search, save and match system to make the website fully usable. As well, since this is a website for students to find opportunities, we want to add more opportunities and even make it possible for the site to automatically update with opportunities.