Transfer Peer Connect

Database

Inspiration

All four team members are former transfer students. We know how hard it can be to find which classes transfer, how integrating your desired school as a transfer student is, and picking between different schools. From experience, we've learned that the best thing to do is find a mentor who has experienced the struggle and wants to help, so we created Transfer Peer Connect!

What it does

One can create an account as a student or mentor. Students can input their area of study and prospective transfer school to be matched with mentors who currently go to the prospective school. Our algorithm takes into account a student's current school, prospective school, and area of study to match with mentors who most closely fit the path that the student wants to pursue.

How we built it

We used React to integrate a front end with html, javascript, and css. Our backend is written in python: this includes our account management system that saves data in an SQL database using sqlalchemy. We use fast API to run our app. For our demo, we wrote a python script to populate the database with fake accounts using requests.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was integrating the backend into the frontend. We had very little experience with React, so merging it with our backend using javascript was quite new to us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using React! React is new to us and we know it is common in industry, so we are happy to get hands on experience and create our first application using it.

What we learned

Creating a full-stack application using new tools: React, sqlalchemy, and fastapi.

What's next for Transfer Peer Connect

Ideally we'd like to make this website public to be used by many. As former transfer students, if we had a social platform to connect with other transfers, we would have jumped at the opportunity to connect. Transferring from a small community college to a large 4-year feels like jumping into the ocean, and it is best to navigate it with a guide.