The Student Co-op

An AI-powered career development platform that helps students transform from "employment-blind" to career-ready.

Comment

Inspiration

I and my teammate realised we were not career-prepared after discovering that academics alone do not get you far in the workplace. We decided to build an app that helps us and fellow students become career-ready whilst still doing their course. We were inspired by other communities in the UK building communities to solve similar problems, and we decided to bring our solution to Bristol, UK.

What it does

Student Co-Op is a full-stack web application that helps students identify and address the "invisible" soft-skill gaps that prevent them from succeeding in their chosen careers.

How we built it

Tech Stack Frontend:

React + Vite + TypeScript Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui Recharts (radar chart visualization) React Router, React Hook Form, Lucide React Backend:

Node.js + Express + TypeScript Cheerio (web scraping) Sanity CMS (database) Axios, cors, dotenv

Challenges we ran into

During the development of Student Co-Op, we encountered several challenges that shaped our final product.

Time Constraints was our biggest challenge. As a hackathon project, we had limited time to implement all our planned features. This forced us to prioritize core functionality over external API integrations. We had to make difficult decisions about what to build immediately versus what to leave for future development.

Budget Constraints also played a significant role. Many of our planned features required paid API services. Deepgram for sentiment analysis would have added cost per request, and Foxit PDF SDK required licensing fees. As students, we couldn't justify these expenses for a prototype.

Complex Integrations proved challenging. Services like You.com and Deepgram would have required significant setup time for API keys, testing, and error handling. The authentication complexity of Jooble and RapidAPI job APIs also stunted our progress.

API Rate Limits were another obstacle. When we considered using official job aggregation APIs, we discovered strict rate limits that would have complicated our demo and potentially caused the application to fail during testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working MVP Efficient Development via vibe coding First successful vibe coded project including a web scraper; learning about serverless and server solution (finalising Akamai tech to deploy our app was humbling); whilst having a clean architecture.

What we learned

We learnt that priortisation is criticial, learning to follow an MVP approach works by building a solid foundation. Now we can incrementally add AI integration. We learned to turn our Figma designs into functioning apps in record time using AI tools, ruthlessly prioritize our standout features, and maximize efficiency with modern development stacks. Techwise, we learnt that client-side solutions can still work. We discovered that browser-native features like print functionality and CSS print styles can replace complex server-side integrations, saving time and money. Deploying on Akamai gave us real-world experience in cloud hosting and provided a robust, scalable foundation for our app's future.

What's next for The Student Co-op

  1. Conversational AI Interview Coaching plus sentiment analysis using Deepgram
  2. Professional PDF Generation
  3. Reliable job aggregation and expand Industry Benchmarks
  4. Enhance user experience by analysing progress with user's real time situation/ goals
  5. Official Launch

Built With

Share this project:

Updates