Inspiration
My inspiration came from the rapidly shifting CS market, where good grades no longer translated into career opportunities. I saw that existing study tools didn't account for this shift, and that advertising better grades is antiquated. I wanted to make an app that addressed these issues properly, one that advertised career readiness and success, something that people are currently in desperate need for.
What it does
StudentAgent builds upon the existing study tool paradigm, where students can make notes and test themselves on them using multiple choice questions and flashcards. However, there is a career system build on top of it that takes advantage of the note content to map them towards skills conducive to a student's specific career goal. Students can say "I want to work as a fullstack engineer at Google" and receive a set of skills they need to study to be a good fit for the role, and see what notes they've created would be good to study for it as well as the courses at their schools that directly cover those topics.
How I built it
I build StudentAgent using React Native and Expo in Typescript for it to function both as a web app and a mobile app in the appstore. I used Google Gemini through the Vertex AI API for the chat feature and for generating notes, flashcards, etc. I used AWS EC2 for running the backend server, including using FFMPEG and YTDL for transcribing Youtube videos.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The Youtube transcriber was a pivotal part of the process since that's the most efficient way to generate topical notes, the underlying item needed for most of the other existing functionality. Originally the transcription was super token expensive, coming to about 2 dollars per hour of video, but by separating the audio and adding some optimization tricks it ended up being 0.2 dollars per hour, which is good given the amount of free credits I allow users.
I'm also proud of the course mapping, which is the result of me using agentic web scrapers to get course data from schools and map them to skills so that users get current and relevant data on what courses would suit their career goals best.
What's next for StudentAgent
I plan to support more schools in the future, and allow the chat system to edit notes in place. I also want to ingest data on the jobs themselves students want to guarantee that the skills shown are the most relevant ones. If possible I'd like to include events/hackathons for CS majors, and events/targeted test prep for pre-med and pre-law students planning to apply for med/law school since those also have similar requirements as jobs do (grades/experience).
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