Overview of My Submission

College search can become cumbersome as the student has to shortlist colleges, figure out application deadlines, tuition, application fee and other details. This app allows students to search for colleges in the United States. It allows them to create an account and star their search results. Once logged in, the student can search for a college and add an entry for that college to track their progress during the application process.

Using this web app a student can keep all data related to their college search in one place, and make changes easily. Moreover, they can share the data collected during their college search with other students. This would save students time as they have the necessary data that they would have looked up themselves otherwise. They might need to look for some changes especially in application fee, deadline and tuition as they tend to change every semester. But apart from that, any other information collected by the student could prove helpful to other students. For example, a student is able to get more insight about a program/major/degree by talking to existing students or professor and makes a note of it in his record. Upon sharing, other student would benefit from that and save a lot of time if he/she was also looking for the same.

The web app currently has authentication, college search, capability to add a record for application at a college, adding search results to favorites, and sharing data with other registered users. The plan was also to include uploading and storing any relevant documents and adding notes but only the backend part is complete for this.

A variety of collections were created like applications - to store a record of application to a college created by user, favorites - any search result starred by the user, users - stores authentication data, us_states - public data about US states, us_universities - ~7000 records of colleges in the US.
A few other collections are also created for analytical purposes like resets - to track account credential changes made by user to inform of malicious activity.

The app is not deployed on cloud but runs locally. The backend (app-server) requires a .env file which can be requested by contacting me here or via Issue on Github.

Submission Category:

Choose Your Own Adventure

Link to Code

root/
 app-client/ : Frontend application built using Angular 
 app-server/ : Backend API built using Express.js and Node.js
 .gitignore
 LICENSE
 README.md

/** frontend */
cd app-client
npm install
ng serve

/** api's */
cd app-server
npm install
npm run start:dev

Additional Resources / Info

The frontend app is built using Angular and the backend REST API is built using Node.js, Express.js and MongoDB. The MongoDB database is hosted on Atlas.

College data is obtained from data.gov

Screenshots

MongoDB Atlas Screenshots

Thanks for Reading!

[Reminder]: # (Submissions are due on January 13th, 2022 @ 11:59 PM PT/2 AM ET on January 14th, 2022/6 AM UTC on January 14th, 2022).