Don’t know how to do and what to do in your college life, don’t worry and log on to Mentoraction. About the project Be sure to write what inspired you, what you learned, how you built your project, and the challenges you faced. Format your story in Markdown.
We belong to a 2nd tier engineering college, due to which we faced a lot of problems in our college life related to planning and everything. We didn’t have proper knowledge about coding or different coding languages, or for that matter open source contributions,hackathons,research papers and projects. It was all new to us. Nonetheless we were unaware about the opportunities we could have after our graduation. Same is the situation for tier 3 college students. The atmosphere in tier 2 and 3 colleges is very different as compared to tier 1 colleges. Students belonging to tier 1 colleges still get better opportunities than us. Moreover, we didn't get any needed guidance from our college professors. We were very clueless for most of our college life. We felt a dire need of a mentor who could guide us and show us different paths and tell us about the opportunities and struggles we were going to face in the future so that we could be prepared for them and could prepare for them accordingly. It is not like counsellors are not present in today’s era. But they are highly expensive and maximum students cannot even afford them. So, we came up with an idea “Mentoraction” so that the future generation doesn’t face the same problem like we did.
“Mentoraction” acts as a bridge between mentors and the students. The bridge we have built to cover the gap between them. It is a platform in which students have the opportunity to connect with mentors from different backgrounds, with different work/ education experience. In this, both the students and the mentors can see each other's profile/resume. On the basis of the profile of the mentors students can interact with them . To add to it, the students can rate the mentors on the basis of the response they received so that other students can approach that mentor. We have tried our best to make this platform free of cost, but mentors can charge students if they want to. But we have made sure that the rates are not high and everyone can afford them.
For our project we needed a web platform so for that we used MEN stack( MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js). Our project is all about back-end so we first prepared schemas for mentors and users using mongodb database. After that, all of the backend was written in node.js express framework again with the help of Mongodb. After completing the backend we started with the frontend and tried to make it an interactive one. Since this platform is all about interaction between mentors and users, we integrated chat features wherever needed. After the completion of coding, we deployed the project to Google cloud and registered the same in GoDaddy domain. We chose MEN stack because node.js framework can easily be converted into desktop application. Also, it can easily be converted into react native application for frontend which will help us to run it on both android and ios.
The main challenge we faced was shortage of time. We had our college exams and we were preparing side by side for the placement. Also, we didn't have a proper team as everyone had a lot of stuff on their plate like us. So, we two had to do everything in a 2 days time period. Moreover, the backend in this project was really complex, specifically the chat application part as we had never done that before. In addition, we have always deployed our project in Heroku, this was the first time we did in Google cloud thus we faced certain challenges in that as well.
One of our major accomplishments is that we handled so many things together and completed the project on time. Another accomplishment we are really proud of is that we made the platform from scratch and added various features like chat application, login, sign up, etc that to be in a 2 day time frame. Also we learnt a new way of deploying our project which feels like an accomplishment. We know with the help of our project,”Mentoraction” students will get proper guidance and this project will be of a lot of use for them and knowing that they won’t have to face what we did gives a feeling of pride.
We learnt a lot of stuff from teamwork to teamspirit, from how to handle time pressure to how to manage time. We learnt the proper usage of github, all the things related to chat applications, how to build a complex backend, how to deploy in Google Cloud. We also got a chance to learn new frameworks and applications. In addition, since we included cookies for authentication in our code for the first time, we learnt how to work on the same. Also, we got a lot of knowledge related to integration of chat applications into a platform.
Firstly, we will work on making it more dynamic so that mentors can login themselves on their own. Our next aim would be to make it more interactive and user friendly. We still have to add more features into it and will also keep on adding them in the future as per the need. We are also thinking of converting it to react within 2 3 months after getting comfortable with react. We also wish to convert it into a mobile app as “Mentoraction” has chat features and chat features are more user friendly in a mobile app and everyone is habitual of chatting via smartphones. If it would be possible, we would like to diversify our mentors, and would like to include as many mentors as we could that are from every possible domain so that students can get knowledge/guidance for any domain present out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbZk-0Rxlk
cd The/Mentors
npm install
npm run dev-start
Go to http://127.0.0.1:3000/
Feel free to play with it.