ScholarshipMatcher

Inspiration

There are a plethora of scholarships out there and each scholarship has its own requirements and prompts that the student has to answer in an essay format. Due to the process being time consuming, or lack of resources that provide students the necessary writing support, students tend to apply to scholarships with a generic essay which can lower their chance of winning them.

What it does

We made ScholarshipMatch, to help students win scholarships by having AI write tailored essays for them. The platform matches scholarships to students based on their profile information and the scholarship description, and uses Claude to generate a generic and a personalized essay for them, increasing their chances of winning.

How we built it

We created a platform that displays scholarships to students, shows them the matching score by comparing their profile information with the scholarship description, to enable them to see which scholarships they qualify for the most. We integrated Claude as our AI tool to generate high quality essays. How Claude is used: Analyze the scholarship description and discovers patterns between it and the user profile to match the user’s description to what the scholarship is looking for Explainable AI: Explains the reasons why there is a match between the scholarship and the user Helps the user embellish their story and make the key values stand out through specific essay generation that matches student qualifications, background and goals to the scholarship description This way, the scholarship application process is made easy with the help of this tool

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out Claude API, being able to navigate and route different pages, training the model to generate high quality essays worthy of scholarship application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The quality of the essays our tool generates are worthy of applying to scholarships, and being able to accomplish this task in a short amount of time.

What we learned

Being able to train our model for essay generation, and working with Claude API, and navigating all the frameworks and tools used to make this project.

What's next for ScholarshipMatcher?

Collaborate with Colleges and Universities for their students to use our platform, adding more features on here to make it more accessible for students with disabilities, allow video submission option for scholarships that require them. Implement automatic submission to scholarship provider websites with proof of submission (receipts/confirmations). Track submitted applications and their status