FindYourHawk — Submission Summary ✨ Inspiration Lehigh students constantly juggle academic pressure, job hunting, research opportunities, scholarships, and campus resources — yet these opportunities are scattered across Handshake, department pages, faculty labs, and university announcements. Nothing existed that brought all Lehigh-specific opportunities into one personalized, AI-powered hub. At the same time, student well-being is a crucial part of academic success. I wanted a system where students could not only grow academically but also check in with their emotional state in a simple, safe way. That’s how FindYourHawk (FYH) and MINDHAWK were born — a unified AI system designed to help students discover opportunities and support their well-being in one place.

🧭 What it does FindYourHawk is an AI-powered opportunity navigator for Lehigh students that provides:

  1. Personalized opportunity matching Matches students with on-campus jobs, lab positions, RA opportunities, scholarships, and events. Uses their major, interests, and career goals to produce a ranked list. Includes faculty names, department affiliation, and direct application links.

  2. Recruiter Portal Professors/labs/organizations can post opportunities directly. Automatically appears in the internal database and gets matched to students.

  3. Lehigh Single-Sign-On (demo)

  4. Email validation (@lehigh.edu)

  5. User type selection (Student / Staff)

  6. Student type (Undergraduate / Graduate)

  7. Major selection

  8. MINDHAWK: Student well-being check-in A lightweight mood reflection tool Uses an LLM to generate:

  9. Emotion summary

  10. Encouraging statements

  11. Simple coping suggestions

  12. With strict guardrails (no medical/diagnostic content)

  13. Hawk-themed branding + modern UI

  14. Custom “FindYourHawk” logo

  15. Custom “MINDHAWK” logo (heart + hawk + brain)

  16. Sidebar navigation with clear categories

  17. Clean, intuitive Streamlit interface

🛠 How we built it

  • Frontend/UI: Streamlit
  • Backend Matching Engine: Python + LLM (OpenAI API)
  • Data Processing: Pandas for structured opportunity parsing
  • Storage: Local CSV (can be upgraded to Supabase/PostgreSQL)

Design:

  • Custom Lehigh-inspired color palette (brown, gold, cream)
  • Custom logos generated based on Lehigh’s Hawk + heart/brain themes
  • Key Features Implemented
  • State-managed navigation
  • Mock Lehigh SSO: Intelligent matching with rationale generation Recruiter posting form:
  • Clean UI layout with categories (Opportunities / Recruiting / Well-being Tools)

🧱 Challenges we ran into

  • Ensuring safe LLM behavior for mental-health content without diagnostic language
  • Handling Streamlit session state reruns (st.experimental_rerun() → st.rerun())
  • Sidebar navigation interfering with main layout
  • Managing environment variables and avoiding API key exposure
  • Designing a logo that merged heart + brain + hawk in a simple, modern way
  • Aligning UI to feel “Lehigh-branded” while keeping it clean and modern

🏆 Accomplishments we’re proud of

  • Built a fully functioning prototype of a unified opportunity navigator personalized to Lehigh students
  • Designed custom branding (FindYourHawk + MINDHAWK)
  • Implemented safe and empathetic mental-wellbeing responses
  • Clean and intuitive UI with sidebar navigation
  • A flexible matching engine that can easily scale to real Lehigh job datasets
  • Solved a real campus problem with an AI-powered solution

📚 What we learned

  • How to build a multi-module Streamlit application with persistent state
  • How to design a clean UX for students and recruiters
  • How to enforce secret management and avoid GitHub push protection issues
  • How to structure LLM prompts for safety + usefulness https://github.com/shinnew9/FindYourHawk
  • How real campus problems can be solved with lightweight AI prototypes

🚀 What’s next for FYH

  • Integrating Supabase or PostgreSQL for real user and opportunity storage
  • Actual Lehigh SSO (CAS) + Duo Mobile integration
  • Expanding the opportunity dataset:
  • Campus jobs
  • RA/TA positions
  • Faculty research labs
  • Scholarships & grants
  • Advanced recommendation model (hybrid LLM + embeddings)
  • Student portfolio / profile pages
  • MINDHAWK daily streaks + mood journaling dashboard
  • Making FYH available publicly for the Lehigh community

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