Inspiration
When we were high school students, we had no idea of what we wanted to be, let alone what to major in. If we did, we were probably going to change our minds at some point in college. We want to make this decision process clear and informative for high schoolers and college students who are undecided on what they want to be and/or what to major in. It would be awesome if this app helped an aspiring or current college student make one of the most important decisions in life, but the least we want it to do is give an idea.
What it does
Choose one of Brooklyn College's schools. Then choose a major. At this point, the app will use the data that we scraped from LinkedIn's job search to scan through job listings that would be returned if the major was typed into LinkedIn's jobs search bar. One thing we used from the scraped data were the job titles from the listings, and another thing were key words found from the job listings that were considered technical skills and soft skills. All this provides a set of job titles and pie charts breaking down the most frequently requested skills to give the user information of what they could achieve to be if they were studying the major they clicked on. This allows the user to have one or more majors in mind with skills they have to learn or work on.
How we built it
Jordan had the idea for the project and both members continuously refined the idea until they felt they had something with potential. Both members thought of the design/flow of the app, and Neo implemented it into the prototype using Swift. As for the data, Jordan scraped it from LinkedIn's job postings and filtered it for Neo to use for the app.
Challenges we ran into
Originally, we wanted to access LinkedIn's job postings by accessing its API. Neo found it difficult to do, so we decided to scrape data from its postings instead.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Every Hackathon is a rewarding experience. This is Brooklyn College's first hackathon but due to the Coronavirus and NYC quarantine, it had to be done remotely. We are proud of Brooklyn College's computer science club for continuing the hackathon. We are graduating this year, so to attend the college's inaugural hackathon is an awesome accomplishment and an amazing way to cap off our college careers! In terms of the development process, we're just proud that we could get together and combine our creative juices to create something decent. Teamwork!
What we learned
Neo improved his Swift/iOS development skills. Jordan applied his skills a bit with Python. From the data we scraped from LinkedIn's job postings that queried "computer science" from its search bar, we learned from our breakdown the most frequently requested technical and soft skills and job titles other than the usual software engineer or web developer.
What's next for BC Decides
For now, the app is based on Brooklyn College. This app could be extended to other colleges and universities, and target current professionals who are looking for a career change. It could even be used to educate all others who want to know more about what's out there and what they have to learn to get there.
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