Inspiration 💡
Since our team members began searching for summer internships, our weekends have been spent exploring the workforce and scouring for the faintest information on a company’s culture. Despiting seeing plenty about work hours and the overall atmosphere, there is little shared about the unique experiences and challenges women face while being a minority within STEM-based industries. Our team recognizes the lack of female-oriented resources for women entering STEM-based industries which is why we created WiSdom, a platform allowing Women in STEM to gain wisdom and confidence in their career choices.
What it does 💻
WiSdom fosters an inclusive community through two key features:
- Explore their future workplaces
- Share their experiences as women in STEM
How we built it 🛠️
Our initial prototypes were visualized within Figma and further developed into a responsive web application through React. On the backend, we web scraped an online database using Python, Beautiful Soup and Requests to retrieve the degree of “female-friendly” companies are. Then, we deployed Firebase to host the web app, and to store user reviews and the scraped information. For the frontend, React, HTML and CSS were used to display the web application.
Challenges we ran into ⛰️
Implementing Firebase into the backend: Since we had minimal experience working with Firebase, significant trial and error was required to understand how to use the platform and its various features (eg. Realtime Database, Hosting the web app).
Web scrapping for the first time: It required extensive learning to understand the concept and the various technologies required to perform web scraping (ex. Beautiful Soup and Request).
Understanding each other’s strengths: We have not previously have not worked together on a technical project which made it difficult to initially allocate tasks and work efficiently together.
Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏅
Despite UofTHacks X being most of our first hackathons, we challenged ourselves to understand with new technologies and tools while ambitiously aiming to deploy an accessible product. From creating a web app we and an underrepresented community can benefit from, we are proud to have accomplished our goal while undergoing the bonding, joy, hardships and exhaustion of the hackathon experience.
What we learned 📚
New technologies and tools: how to use Firebase and React and learning how to web scrape. More about each other: UofTHacks X was truly a bonding experience which brought us closer as teammates and friends.
What's next for WiSdom ⏭️
Implementing a messaging feature to further create a supportive community during the job search process and employee experience. Creating a more specific review system to provide a more accurate and detailed description of the workplace culture. Developing a curated algorithm to connect women to mentors and peers experiencing similar experiences or within similar industries and fields.
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