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Rutgers Newark CS491 Senior Project

This is a semester long group project set up as the senior capstone, in conjunction with an outside company. The purpose is to develop a skill and demonstrate the competency of the group members in building and developing using this skill.

The Rutgers students involved in this project are:

• Amy Tengelics
• David Balladares
• Ira Streeter

The Contact and the cooperating company are

• iCims, Boris Kozak

This particular project, as decided by Boris and the students, will focus on front end development. The first phase of the project will use skills in HTML,CSS, and Javascript; While the second phase of the project will focus on learning and developing using the React framework. The project has several phases, which are outlined below

Phase 1 - Initial Concept brainstorming

Phase 1 involved brainstorming to decide what project would actually be developed and built and the topic on which the project would involve. The initial problem identified by the Rutgers team was the discrepancy of competitiveness between the internship market and the actual job market of the technology fields. While the job market need is extremely high and exponentially growing, the internship market is extremely competitive, with most students having difficulty securing a position. The problem the Rutgers team chose to focus on is the absence of a website for listing internships specifically. While job searching websites, like Indeed.com, have filters to search for internships, they do not have their own home. Many students encounter problems with expired and irrelevant listings.

Phase 2 - Market Research

The Rutgers team was tasked with providing proof of the concept. That the problem they believed to exist, was actually a problem that a majority of students face. To tackle this problem, the Rutgers team created a Google Poll and distributed it to the Computer Science and Information Technology students via email. The poll itself had 6 questions asking where they had searched for internships, if they had encountered difficulties, and what difficulties they had encountered. The final question asked if students wished their was a service for finding internships. The market research results proved the original concept of the Rutgers Team. They developed a business case, and had their concept approved by Boris.

Phase 3 - Deciding what to develop and build

The Rutgers team was then tasked with decided very specifically how they would like to move forward to build a solution. The decided on path, that both demonstrated a solution to the problem proved during market research and also fulfilled the requirement of demonstrating competency of an important skill was to design a full front end for a student-internship matching service. The site would collect information from available sources to populate itself with listings that are both not expired and relevant. The first project would see the front end designed using HTML, CSS, and vanilla Javascript. The second project would be to design the same front end implementing the React framework, to be able to compare the process, functionality, and usability of each project.

Phase 4 - Creating the GitHub repository and S3 Bucket

The Rutgers team created a GitHub repository to better be able to separate out the work responsibilities of all the group members. One group member also set up an S3 bucket to be able to host the static site. A pipeline was then created using AWS codepipeline and GitHub webhooks so all group members could easily and automatically deploy changes to the static site.

Phase 5 - Building the static site

A static site was designed using HTML and CSS. The original skeleton site was plain, but eventually would allow the group members to divide the work more easily using the skeleton site. Work was distributed to the group members. One group member was responsible for styling the site to look more professional, which resulted in the static site currently available on the S3 endpoint. Another group member was tasked with externalizing the data using JSON and vanilla Javascript. Another group member was tasked with researching available internships and job listing websites.

Phase 6 - Researching and Learning the React Framework

The current stage of development involves the Rutgers team doing extensive research on the React Framework and learning how to best implement it to design the same project as the HTML and CSS static site.