Career Paver — Hackathon Submission Report

1. Who Are We?

• Beheshta - UX Designer

• Sireen - Product manager

• Zetasha - Software engineer

1. Framing the Problem

For students early in their careers, the job search is messy and stressful. Internship and graduate deadlines are spread across loads of different company websites, and there isn’t one place to track everything. Most advice online is also really generic and doesn’t take into account things like your degree, your year of study, or what kind of career you actually want.

Because of this, students often miss deadlines or feel overwhelmed trying to keep track of everything. This especially affects undergraduates and recent graduates who don’t have strong professional networks or access to careers coaching.

2. Idea Explanation

Career Paver is a personalised platform that helps students organise their early-career opportunities. It brings internships, graduate schemes, events, and networking opportunities into one centralised interactive calendar.

When users sign up, they give a short voice note or write a short description about their background, interests, and career goals. The platform then fills their calendar with relevant opportunities and sorts them by how soon the deadlines are.

To make the process less stressful, the platform also adds a gamification layer. Users earn XP, level up, and complete “quests” as they apply for opportunities, turning the job search into something more structured and motivating.

3. Implementation

Career Paver is built as a React single-page application (SPA) using TypeScript. Routing is handled with React Router v7, and global state is managed using the Context API with localStorage so user progress stays saved between sessions.

The frontend is built with reusable components and a custom pixel-art inspired design system using the Press Start 2P font and a lavender/magenta colour palette.

The app has four main sections:

• Quest Board – a personalised calendar showing upcoming deadlines and events

• Quest Log – a Kanban-style board where users track their applications

• AI Mail Forge – a tool that helps generate application emails

• Dashboard – shows XP progress and user level

For the hackathon version, the app doesn’t use an external backend. All data is stored on the client side, and the AI features are simulated to demonstrate how onboarding parsing and email generation would work.

4. Challenges

One of the biggest challenges was keeping the user experience consistent across multiple pages while also building a fully custom design style.

The pixel-art theme looked good visually but needed careful adjustments to keep everything readable and accessible.

Another technical issue came from Recharts, where a duplicate key bug happened because the library’s Legend component shared key namespaces with Cell elements. This was fixed by removing the built-in legend and creating a custom legend outside the chart.

5. Accomplishments

During the hackathon we built a working prototype from scratch, including:

• A 4-step onboarding flow

• A drag-and-drop Kanban board for tracking applications

• An AI-style email generator

• A deadline calendar

• A live XP and level progression system

We’re especially proud of how the pixel-art design system ties everything together and how the gamification makes the job search feel more engaging rather than stressful.

6. Next Steps

Next, we plan to improve the platform by:

• Adding a real AI layer using the Gemini API to process voice onboarding and personalise opportunity matching

• Integrating a Supabase backend for user accounts, saved progress, and real opportunity feeds

• Adding deadline notifications through push notifications and email

• Making the platform fully mobile responsive and potentially wrapping it as a native mobile app

• Expanding the gamification features with achievement badges, streaks, and peer leaderboards, where users select a retro-style character that evolves as they apply for opportunities and complete career-related milestones, as well as an AI-powered opportunity matching feature that recommends internships based on user interests and allows them to swipe through suggestions while generating a structured timeline to help manage each stage of the application process.