GradWise College Prep

Dashboard page of GradWise College Prep
Login Page
Virtual Counselor Page
Schedule Creator Page
Essay Evaluator Page
College Recommender Page
College Comparer Page
Common App Guide
FAFSA Financial Aid Guide
Admissions Process Guide
Profile Page

The project is available to use for anyone at https://gwprep.vercel.app right now with all functioning features!

Inspiration

When we first looked at the list of the tens of company profiles, we couldn't find anything that related to us. However, when we saw GradWise College Prep, we knew we had to make a solution for it. Both Nikhil and Arnav have had elder siblings who went through or are going through the college admissions process, and find it confusing and hard to navigate. Because of this, we were inspired to create an app that would help reach all families and navigate them through the common application, financial aid form (FAFSA), and overall college admissions process by improving upon GradWise.

What it does

GradWise College Prep provides a platform for struggling high school students to complete their college applications from start to finish.

To start, we have a virtual counselor. Our virtual counselor is able to answer any question that the user has about the college admissions process, and stores chat history so that it can have context for what the user likes or doesn't like, struggles, or anything else. Next, we have a schedule planner. Our schedule planner takes in the tasks that the user has, a timeframe, and automatically generates a schedule overview and an interactive schedule for the user to click through and complete their tasks with. This schedule also saves through our database so that the user can come back anytime to view it. We also have a college recommender. This recommender takes inputs such as your location and income bracket to generate a list of the top 5 colleges near you, listing its tuition, financial aid opportunities, location, and key highlights. It also saves so you can view it at any time. Finally, we have a college comparer. Many students are confused on which college to choose after they get into a handful. Our college comparer takes an input of two universities from the user and generates its academic details, financial details, and personalized pros and cons depending on the user's location and income bracket. It also helps you decide which are the best in different categories by scoring them.

Finally, we have 3 guides for the user to read through. First, we have the Common App guide. This guide allows the user to see what things they will need to finish to fill out their Common App and allows them to mark certain tasks as complete, helping them save their progress in their college admissions journey along the way. It also links external resources for the user to refer to if they have any questions. Next, we have our FAFSA guide. This is for any low-income families who are seeking financial aid to send their child to college. It provides information on the types of federal, state, and institutional aid, best practices for filling out the form, and further additional resources for them to refer to. Finally, we have our admissions process. This provides a timeline for the user to finish their application by, things they need to do, application components, and common admission factors in college.

Additionally, we have a profile page where the user can edit their profile settings, location, and income bracket.

Altogether, our app provides a strong starting point for those who are confused about the college admissions process to pull through and make it towards the end.

How we built it

We used Tailwind CSS, Typescript, Node.js, and SQL to build our app. Our main app was made using mostly typescript files and we also had some JSON and Node.js files for the configuration of our packages. For most of our features, we used the Gemini API and model to retrieve information for our user. To save the other features, we sent that data to a table in Supabase and controlled it using the SQL editor in there.

Challenges we ran into

We had lots of challenges with adding new features to the app as it brought up some errors that we weren't sure how to fix since this was our first time using Typescript. Along with that, we had issues with recording the video as sometimes our screen wasn't recording and it was bugged.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making a really clean UI as this is are first time integrating Tailwind CSS and Typescript to build a fully functioning web app and that it looked very nice and was fully featured on its own.

What we learned

We learned that time management was very important as we ran out of time at the end to add some more stuff to our video.

What's next for GradWise

We want to make it a Flutter app, buy a custom domain name and hosting server, and train a custom LLM agent with guardrails instead of using the regular Gemini API.