Building a CRM for College Career Services

Braden Watkins — Wed, 20 May 2020 23:38:45 +0000

Prospect: A CS Capstone Project

During my Senior Year at Brigham Young University, I had the opportunity to participate in a Software Engineering Capstone project over the course of a year. Four of my peers and I were initially assigned to a project that fell through for technical reasons, so we were given the opportunity to create our own project. One need that we had seen in our own college experience was for students to be able to better work with career services and obtain the jobs that they were seeking. Through talking with our university's career services, we discovered that this pain was not only felt by the students.

Over the course of the year we built and iterated on our idea until we eventually built an MVP of a CRM specifically meant for college career services. The BYU Career Services department has expressed interested in future development, and we hope that another capstone team next year will take of the project and continue to create an application that will help the university better help its students to get good jobs, especially in the coming months and years.

Demo Link

You can see a demo video on youtube

Link to Code

The code is hosted in a public github repository

How we built it

The five of us came from very different technical backgrounds so we tried to chose technologies that at least some of us had knowledge of. We used dozens of different technologies that are listed below:

Authentication: Firebase Authentication is super simple to set up and manage. Their SDK made it really easy to tie auth into our application with middleware on the backend to authenticate the endpoints
Charting: Chart.js is a popular javascript charting library
Data Layer: GraphQL is a new API paradigm that is becoming popular. It allows the client to grab all of the data it needs (and only the data it needs) in a single API call. GraphQL replaces a REST architecture
Forms: Formik is a popular form management library for React
- Schema Validation: Yup is an object schema validation library that integrates easily with Formik
Framework: React
- This project was bootstrapped with Create React App
- This project heavily uses the React Hooks and Context APIs
HTTP Layer: Relay is a Facebook library that integrates GraphQL with React to provide a datastore and HTTP layer. It allows each component to declare the data it needs, and then makes API calls when needed.
Linting: Prettier is a linting/formatting library that keeps code in a single format
Routing: ReactRouter is a popular declarative routing library for React.
Styles: Material UI is a popular UI component library
Server: Node Express is a popular Node.js server framework
Hosting: AWS Lambda was a low cost hosting option
Database: DynamoDB is a low cost NoSQL database

Qualtrics Intern - Summer 2019

Braden Watkins — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 21:20:03 +0000

Summer 2019 I had a great opportunity to intern at Qualtrics. I want to walk through my decision to interview at Qualtrics, the other companies I interviewed with, why I chose Qualtrics, and what my overall experience has been.

Why I applied to Qualtrics

While beginning my journey through the Computer Science program at Brigham Young University (BYU) I began to hear about a local company named Qualtrics that was growing. Over the course of the next two years I continue to hear more and more about Qualtrics in the news, see them at STEM Career Fairs, and at Computer Science club events. I even took an opportunity to go on an office tour to see what the company was all about. In each of my interactions, Qualtrics impressed me as a driven, growing, local where I could see myself interning and eventually working full time.

I applied to Qualtrics for the first time in fall during my Sophomore year and never heard back. Since then I've learned that having taken (or currently taking) an "Algorithms" class is essentially a prerequisite to getting an interview. So I waited a year and then re-applied in fall of my Junior year where I got called back for an interview.

Summer 2019 internship options

Besides interviewing with Qualtrics, I had an impromptu interview with Instructure at the STEM fair and an on-site interview with Pluralsight. I ended up receiving offers from all three companies. Overall, I was much more interested at interning with Pluralsight or Qualtrics than I was with Instructure. Deciding between Pluralsight and Qualtrics was difficult though!

Pluralsight has a very unique development culture that focuses on collaboration and test-driven development. I was interested in working there because I knew I could learn a lot by pairing or mobbing with one or more engineers every day. But I was also drawn to the high-growth, scrappy Qualtrics culture.

At the end of the day, what made the decision for me was the hygiene factor that Qualtrics paid significantly more and since it is located in Provo, I could continue working there after the school year started. Even though my final decision seems a little arbitrary, looking back I'm grateful that I made the choice to go to Qualtrics.

My overall internship experience

The team I was placed on was partially based on my preference and partially based on internal need. I didn't know the project that I was going to be working on until the day I arrived. That being said, my summer project was COOL and the team that I got to work with was a lot of fun!

In a nutshell, my project was to take the two large translation repositories that held 30,000+ language strings for 75+ languages and standardize them by migrating to a new repository and format that would solve some technical debt and allow the localization process to scale as Qualtrics grows. The change impacted every engineer working on the Qualtrics product as well as a localization team working in Dublin. The tech stack that I worked with included Golang, React.js, and Docker.

I was surprised by the amount of autonomy that I had while working on my project. Besides a bi-weekly check-in with my mentor which I created, I was completely free to implement my project in whatever way I deemed best. In one sense, the autonomy was liberating, but it also put significant responsibility on me to finish the project on-time and with minimal negative impact to the engineering organization.

The trade-off to the autonomy though, was that I was not (and still am not) completely integrated with my team like a part-time employee might be. So that's something to consider when debating between an autonomous project-based internship and a position where you effectively would be another team-member.

Conclusion

Qualtrics was an incredible experience for me, and my technical skill and knowledge grew significantly because of my experience there. I would highly recommend sending in an application if you're considering interning there. Also, don't hesitate to reach out to me at braden.watkins5@gmail.com with any questions about getting a job at Qualtrics or the interview process. I'm more than happy to chat!

DEV Community: Braden Watkins