ChaTea

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Inspiration

Let’s face it: it’s challenging entering male-dominated fields as a woman*. Gender bias, gatekeeping, the pressures of 'representing', you name it, you’ve probably seen it. Sometimes, you just need someone to talk to, someone who has been through it or is going through it themselves...

As a team, we took our inspiration from our own experiences as women who are interested in tech. Three out of four of our members feel like we often undervalue our professional worth when networking and all of us are hesitant to reach out to people who we don't have any connections with. Although professional networking platforms like LinkedIn exist to help with networking, they are mainly achievement-oriented and solely professional. We wanted to find a way to help young women and gender minorities find successful people who they can see themselves in.

ChaTea is a play on “chatty” and the two “root” words for tea (cha and te), a cross-cultural drink that would definitely be consumed over conversation.

What it does

ChaTea connects students (both high school and post-secondary) and young professionals who identify as women* or gender minorities with volunteer industry veterans who also identify as women* or gender minorities for casual "tea-time" chats.

Both mentors and mentees can filter matches to fields of interests as well as cultural, linguistic, and geographic preferences, if they so wish, in order to foster both meaningful connections and inclusivity. The main features of ChaTea to connect mentors and mentees would be the message, audio, and video chat options.

How we built it

We started from a strong and detailed UI/UX design in Figma, then implemented back-end features like our own special database in mongodb and node/express. Finally, we have started implementing more of our front-end components html/css and js.

Challenges we ran into

Time management
connecting the mongodb database to node/express
figuring out which languages we should use for our project, so that everyone is comfortably learning

Achievements that we're proud of

Truly putting our all into this project, being able to find a solution to an issue we care about. We are super proud of ourselves for getting a lot of work done within 24 hours.

What we learned

Although we encountered some problems, we learned to how manage our time efficiently and help one another whenever necessary. Moreover, some of us learned new technologies and skills throughout the whole process of creating the project.

What's next for ChaTea

Our goal is to complete the front-end side of our project like the chatting feature and add special badges/icons for the most helpful mentors and most engaged participants! We would also like to find ways on how to improve our UX, so that ChaTea would be even easier to use!