ZotResearch

Discover your next research venture.

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Inspiration

  • It was difficult for us as freshmen to find research opportunities and group projects to work on.
  • UCI is a large research institution with a lot of centers for research and opportunities to create, rendering it hard to choose among options offered as well.
  • Reaching out individually to professors and having decentralized websites for research and project creation is time efficient for busy college students and professors.
  • Save time for college students, help them learn more deeply and enhance their college education while also creating a user-friendly environment for advisors to hire students to research alongside them.
  • Students will be able to come together to build projects and research alongside professors and advisors, finding all their interests and opportunities on one platform instead of searching through the depths of the internet and sitting in the long repository of the emails of professors.

What it does

  • Students and research advisors will be prompted to create an account initially.
  • After being prompted with this information, individuals will be prompted for more information to fully complete their profiles. This will include some keyword details listed in their interests, resume, and even their description.
  • From here, there is an ability to create posts. Students and faculty can create opportunities for others to join them in a team to create projects and research opportunities. Everything will be done under the Add Post menu where users will be prompted to add some keyword information about their post.
  • If users simply want to apply to opportunities and not create any, there is also the option to search through opportunities that match their interests and apply with our simple one-click-apply option. This will be intended to allow for users to have a seamless experience applying to opportunities. Upon submitting an application by clicking the apply button, they will be sending their profile over to the opportunity’s director who can then choose to reach out to the applicants.
  • It is possible to see all of the opportunities that you post as well.

How we built it

  • React for frontend, styled using css with logic configured in JSX.
  • Firebase for authentication and databases

Challenges we ran into

  • Authentication, something that we had some trouble with was learning how we can utilize google to authenticate our users. It took some time for us to figure it out, however through some google searching and some help through other hackers and Hack team members, we were able to figure it out.
  • Combining frontend and backend. Something we ran into here was that we started out our backend in python and we had some initial variables that we needed to be in react however they were stored in python so we couldn’t access them. To work around this, we were able to make the variables available globally throughout the program so this would allow us to bypass this issue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Authentication with React is harder than using Python
  • Combining frontend and backend
  • Utilizing google to authenticate users.
  • Being able to utilize css and jsx as this is many of our first times being exposed to these languages.

What we learned

  • a lot about how data tables are made and branched out in firebase
  • how to authenticate users using google and what it looks like
  • how to successfully use github and create branches of our heads (main and one other branch)
  • how to successfully merge branches and resolve conflicts.
  • how to use css and jsx, alongside how the two work in conjunction with one another to functionally and visually show up in our project
  • how to utilize npm and nodejs to help us in our projects

What's next for ZotResearch

  • Implementing an LLM API that processes information from students’ profiles that pull keywords which it uses to match and recommend research opportunities that are related to those keywords.
  • Implementing a page that allows users to check which opportunities that they applied to.
  • A messaging center in which users can chat together about their ideas, any questions about opportunities, and privately chat about anything.
  • Improving UI and UX based on the launched product if it can gain enough traction and approval.
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