Scholar Pups

Inspiration

We came into the hackathon knowing we wanted to build something that helps students—after all, we're students too. One of our team members is a Schulich leader, and he mentioned how lucky he was to have the guidance and education that prepared him for his application. But he knows that not everyone has the same support, especially those in lower-income areas where the education system lacks the resources to really help. The Canadian government conducted a study on lower-income families and noted that only 31.0% of youth in the bottom 25% of the income distribution attend university, they suggest that youth from economically disadvantaged families are lacking in parental resources or influences, which can hurt cognitive abilities, motivation, study habits, perception of the benefits of university education, social environments, etc.

The United Nations has spotlighted a serious problem in Indigenous communities: the scarcity of teachers fluent in their languages and the shortage of basic educational materials are not only perpetuating a critical education gap that leaves these communities at a disadvantage but also deepening social inequalities and stifling opportunities for future generations. This brings up the question: Why should a student born into a lower-income class/community be denied the guidance and resources that others take for granted?

What it does

Scholar Pups is your online viturtal scholarship counsellor that reviews your applications based on your experiences and background. The service is directed towards increasing the literacy and access to opportunities for people who have barriers to post-secondary education to have an even playing field against the competition. Scholar Pups is a website and chrome extension that works to direct you towards scholarships and help you throughout the application process. What this means is Scholar Pups provides actionable feedback that provides an additional set of eyes on to put your best foot forward.

How we built it

Scholar Pups website is built with the FARM stack, FastAPI, React (Next.js), and MongoDB.

The feedback was built using Llama3.1 and was provided context and fine tuned using LangChain to get the scholarship descriptions and user information from MongoDB.

The Chrome extension was made using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

For majority of us, this was our first hackathon. Figuring out how to work in parallel within the 36 hours was a new experience and dividing up the workload based on skills and interest proved to be a formidable challenge. For some, we experimented with new technologies and skills such as making a Chrome extension or doing web development for the first time.