Vantage

Inspiration

High-income students have private consultants; first-gen and low-income students are "time-poor." We wanted to eliminate the "Administrative Tax"—the hours of bureaucracy that prevent students from accessing the millions in "hidden" campus grants and scholarships they deserve.

What it does

Vantage is an autonomous opportunity engine that moves from discovery to execution. It scours fragmented campus portals for grants, matches them to a student's secure "Identity Vault," and uses agentic AI to auto-draft and ready complex applications for instant submission. We turn a 40-minute burden into a 40-second review task.

How we built it

We built a hybrid platform featuring a Next.js 15 web dashboard and a Vite-React Chrome extension. The stack includes:

• Supabase for secure profile and opportunity storage.
• Firecrawl MCP for intelligent campus portal scraping.
• Claude Code and Playwright for the agentic drafting and form-filling logic.
• Clerk for seamless student authentication.

Challenges we ran into

Mapping non-standard, legacy University web forms to structured student data was a hurdle. We had to develop a custom DOM-to-JSON analyzer capable of interpreting inconsistent field labels and mapping complex personal narrative essays into varied form structures without losing the student's unique voice.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully moved the needle from passive "lists" to active "execution." Seeing the agent accurately map a student's complex GPA, first-gen status, and resume into a live scholarship application in under 10 seconds was our biggest "aha" moment.

What we learned

The biggest barrier to equity isn't just a lack of information—it’s the sheer friction of administrative burden. We learned that for an AI tool to truly serve underrepresented students, it must do more than "know"; it must "act."

What's next for Vantage

We plan to expand beyond UMD to create a universal "Apply with Vantage" protocol. Our goal is to integrate with state-wide and national aid portals, creating a zero-friction gateway to every dollar of student support available globally.

Built With

• claude-code
• clerk
• firecrawl
• git
• next.js-15
• node.js
• playwright
• react
• shadcn/ui
• supabase
• tailwind-css
• typescript
• vercel
• vite