Corponector: Connecting students and companies

Overview

Corponector is a web application designed for students and companies to connect with each other. Students are able to create a profile indicating their interests, skills, and other information that other students and companies can look at and have access to open job positions from different companies. Additionally, companies can create profiles indicating what skills they are looking for and what available job positions they have. On the companies’ and students’ home pages, they are able to see their own profile and recommended companies and students. On the search page, users can sort by students and/or companies, skills, location, or positions.

Contributions

Working as team, our group created issues, such as creating a mock-up pages for the student profile or company profile or adding functionality to read data from the database or pushing data to the database. Within three milestones, we were able to develop the application, having significantly improved its layout and functionality by the third.

I was responsible for the student side of the application. That is, creating the student home page, showing the student’s own profile with recommended companies. Additionally, it had an “Edit” button that allowed the students to modify their profile using a similar form to that of when they signed up to the Corponector application. Our team worked together to read from and push into the database using PostgreSQL.

Learning Experience

With this project, I gained experience in web application development. Before ICS 314: Software Engineering I, all the programming I have done were simple assignments that helped solidify my understanding in algorithms and programming, be it in Java, C, or C++. However, with Corponector, I was able to contribute to a project, producing a working application that students and companies can find beneficial to their professional experiences.

From this experience, I solidified my understanding of functional programming and coding standards and learned how to build an application through Next.js and connecting the application to a database. With five of us working together, it was important that our code was easy to read for debugging purposes, but also so that our team can use our code for their own purposes and understand what it does. Additionally, we used React Bootstrap to build the pages, which taught me how to create interactive interfaces using components from the libraries and our own.

Not only did working the Corponector application help with my technical skills but also soft skills. Our team had to communicate with each other to let each other know our progress on the issues we were working on and, if needed, asked for help when we were unable to fix a bug or did not know how to solve one of the issues. It also made us think creatively with regards to the layout of the website and applying what we learned in class to the project, developing our problem-solving skills.

Relevant Links

Corponector GitHub Organization, Corponector Home Page, Corponector