The Career Outpost

Inspiration

During the panel, one of the members spoke about how they love philosophy, however, they didn't realize they weren't going to pursue a career in it until a comedian said something. This caused us to think. When we're young, we are always asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" For me, I was even in programs that helped us choose a field that we find intriguing. Despite this, I still could not give a consistent answer to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I went from aerospace engineer to electrical engineer, to chef, and even now I'm not entirely sure what I want to do. So, with all this in mind, my brother and I came up with the idea of a career explorer that helps people find detailed career information in a fast and organized way. Thus, helping students answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

What it does

Our web app, The Career Outpost, helps students explore different career options. The user inputs a career or selects the "random career" option. Then they find information on the overview of the field, the degree required, related occupations, career hotspots, top schools, career skills, and much more. If the user wants to explore more career options, they can select the "Or Discover Another Field?" option at the bottom of the page to go back to the search.

How we built it

• Built with Vite development server, vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Gemini API generates detailed Career Reports
• Logo.dev generates company/school images

Challenges we ran into

• Getting around CORS issues (since we didn't make a full proxy server)
• Frontend UI kinks
• Setting up the collaborative code environment

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For me (Gabe), I am a beginner coder, so this was an advanced task for me. I wanted to have an animated background for the web app, so I researched animated backgrounds with the GitHub code for them. Once I found one I liked, I had to figure out how to implement it into our code. The background had a slice that we felt was too distracting, and we decided we only wanted this animation to occur when a button is pressed. I figured out how to only have the animation occur once when the button is pressed, how to change the speed, and how to allow re-triggering. I am very proud of this because this is the first time I've ever worked with animating backgrounds, and this gave some life to the web app.

For me (Daniel), this was a fun project. Its about a year since my last hackathon and I believe we created something we can be proud of. I think we learned a lot and this was a very memorable experience.

What we learned

• Gemini is an extremely capable LLM that can even serve as the backbone of web applications.
• Sometimes speed (in creating a prototype) is better than production-level practicality
• We come from very different technical backgrounds, so learning how to work together on this project was a big takeaway

What's next for The Career Outpost

• A full (express.js) proxy server to hide API keys from the frontend, as of now it just relays requests with some added headers to get around CORS issues
• Responsive layout supporting multiple devices (mainly mobile)
• Education filtering by the type of school they want, affordability, acceptance rate, and location.
• Web deployment in Vercel and caching of Gemini reports in Supabase (for performance and cost minimization)

Built With

• css
• gemini
• html
• javascript
• logo.dev
• vite