As Computer Science students ourselves, we know that
being hired as interns and researchers over the summers greatly improves our job outlooks after graduation. We also know that this process can be difficult.
Project Summary.
- The CS Career Guide app alleviates this difficulty by providing lists of active Internships, Research Opportunities, and Active Alumni whose contact information can be obtained by reaching out to the future maintainers of this project. We additionally have a fun, interactive scavenger hunt tool to attract students to use this app.
- The CS Career Guide app is a tool designed to help Grinnell Computer Science students develop their careers outside of the classroom.
End Product.
- This Project compiles information for getting internships, research opportunities, and connecting with alumni for Computer Science Students. We want this to be a place people can come to and get meaningful information that allows them to apply and prepare for a career in tech.
- Our audience is Grinnell CS Students. As CS students, we know the process of applying for internships can be difficult and overwhelming. Our app allows users to find relevant information to help them apply for jobs, connect with alumni that can recommend them for jobs, and gain access to resources to become more competitive job candidates. Additionally, a scavenger hunt takes users through various locations important to Grinnell CS majors.
Process.
Our app was developed in four main stages:
- The first was the brainstorming stage, in which we made assumptions about our users and communicated with our clients about what they wanted us to produce for them. In this stage, we created a list of features and attempted to sort them by impact and difficulty of implementation.
- The second stage was the wireframing and screen mockup phase, in which, you guessed it, we made wireframes and screen mockups for the app. This was the design-focused portion of app development, where we took our list of features and came up with innovative and effective ways to display that information. We created these designs on Canva (see below).
- The third was the development stage, where we wrote out the R script to implement our designs. At this stage, some of the designs had to be modified to meet the R shiny application medium.
- The final stage was the documentation. This online presence info is a part of that stage. We wrote this online presence info as well as product and software documentation which are very important for the legacy of this project.
- One challenge we faced was taking internship and research information from the internet and compiling it into spreadsheets that users could interact with. Our solution to this problem was data scraping. There are two Python scripts that take text from the web and convert it to spreadsheets. We also used Python to generate latitude and longitudinal information about the location of Alumni to be displayed on a map. This project will need to be updated by the future maintainers of the app to ensure information remains relevant and accurate.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Wesley Beary, Professor Eliott, and the students of TUT-100: Machines, Space, and Topology (Fall 2022). Wesley was the mentor for our project and helped us consider privacy when creating the Alumni Directory. Professor Elliot was the instructor of the class and provided constructive feedback during the process of building our app. We conducted usability testing on the students, and they provided valuable feedback.
References.
Internships dataset by Pit CSC: https://github.com/pittcsc/Summer2023-Internships
Research dataset: https://github.com/himahuja/Research-Internships-for-Undergraduates
Internship Schedule Image: https://github.com/pittcsc/Summer2023-Internships
Packages Used: Leaflet, ShinyAlert, readxl, DT, shinyWidgets, and Shiny.
