I started this project with my Intro to Entrepreneurship professor, Cynthia King Vance, to address the challenges that students face during their career development. In January, we focused on research and brainstorming.
My research revealed several key challenges students face in career development: lack of confidence, unclear guidance, and limited access to opportunities. To better understand why students struggle to secure internships, I developed several hypotheses—including fear of networking, uncertainty about finding opportunities, and anxiety about rejection. I then validated these assumptions through student surveys and feedback.
I explored several solutions to address these challenges:
My focus was on creating a framework that simplifies career development into manageable steps while using positive reinforcement to maintain student engagement. I decided to move forward with my first idea: a Duolingo-inspired gamified approach to career development. I thought this would be most effective as an app, so students could use it whenever they had free time. I spent some more time researching Duolingo and their business model.
I structured this project as a product management experience, breaking it into research, hypothesis testing, and solution exploration phases. I developed a detailed career roadmap tailored for freshmen, created a Google Form to gather user insights, and defined different student user segments. This iterative process helped me refine the product vision and prioritize features for an MVP.
I created a very simple wireframe for what I envisioned the app to look like.