Jason Scharff
August 23, 2016. 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Scholars4Scholars
Jose Bethancourt
While after my sixth visit (each of 3 hours), I unfortunately haven’t finished it fully (18 hours is not a lot of time to write a coding project), I’m going to finish it over the next few days and do a bit more than the six visits so they can launch it. However, from just playing around with what I have now, I’m amazed how readily available scholarship opportunities are that I had no idea exist. I strongly believe from working on this that a lot of work needs to be in the awareness sphere of how to pay for college. When I was first asked to do this, I though writing a scholarship search engine wouldn’t be doing a whole lot, but obviously I agreed. Now I’m honestly flabbergasted nothing like this existed. All other systems require so much initial energy to just see scholarship options. The biggest step before I can be confident this will help people is how the organization spreads the word about the search engine. However, because Scholars4Scholars has people on the ground in the Rio Grande Valley I’m confident it’ll have targeted impact. However, I strongly believe this can be expanded to more areas––all we need is people to market it.
In doing this I discovered that doing pro-bono development is a lot of fun and rewarding. Living in kind of a bubble, I often don’t think about how technology could be used to help people, but doing this work has convinced me that I could volunteer more and really help people just by using my brain and keyboard.
I’ll update this post once it goes live within the next few days on their website.
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