What Next?

Ever wish you had a Sorting Hat for your life? ‘What Next’ helps you find your perfect path (college, career, or master’s) based on your skills and interests.

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Inspiration

We wanted to create a tool to help solve one of the most challenging questions for ourselves and our peers: deciding the next steps in life. We realized a Harry Potter–themed digital tool was too magical an idea not to bring to life.

What it does

“What Next?”, or as we like to call it, The Digital Sorting Hat, generates personalized pathways based on your choices (college major, college city, master’s specialization, career, or city). It considers your interests, hobbies, and skills to provide a recommendation.

How we built it

We used Visual Studio Code to build both frontend and backend files. The frontend, written in HTML and JavaScript, handles user questions, results, login, and the main page. We used Live Server to run the program locally. For the backend, we used Supabase and the Gemini API to generate results dynamically. Along the way, we also used ChatGPT to help us troubleshoot.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues running our code and debugging errors, which felt overwhelming at first. Understanding how the frontend and backend work, API responses, and managing the time all required patience and problem-solving. By working through these challenges, we now have a much clearer understanding of how the program functions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We celebrated small wins along the way, like the first time we made the website background gradient in purple! Every time a new feature worked or an error was fixed, it felt like a big victory. Seeing our idea come to life, even if it was in small steps, it was incredibly rewarding.

What we learned

Coding an entire program from scratch thaought us a lot of things. First, we learned to be patient with our codes and with each other. We learned that coding isn't perfect overnight and we ended up not doing some of the ideas that we came up with due to lack of time and knowledge. It taught us to be more aware of the time. We also learned that it's okay to not know something and try to get help instead of doing everything on ourselves. We believe that these lessons will stay with us in the future Hackathons.

What's next for What Next?

What's next, is that, we will definitely work on this project as it has a lot of potential. This is just a prototype but it will turn into something greater. After all, everything starts with an idea.

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