Scholarship Finder

A complete full-stack scholarship matching platform. Students fill out a one-time profile (GPA, course, location, income, special categories), and the app instantly returns a ranked list of scholarships scored 0–100 based on eligibility. The Browse page lets users search and filter all available scholarships by name, category, amount type, and location. A Dashboard lets users save scholarships and track application status. A Python scraper fetches live data from Buddy4Study and supplements it with curated mock data. The backend uses a node-cron job to auto-refresh scholarship data on a schedule — so the database always stays current without any manual work.

• Building a full-stack web app with a separate React frontend, Node.js backend, and Python scraper
• Designing RESTful API routes in Express.js (GET, POST endpoints for profiles, scholarships, matching)
• Connecting to MongoDB with Mongoose and designing schemas (Profile, Scholarship)
• Web scraping with Python, BeautifulSoup4, CloudScraper, and fake-useragent for bot evasion
• Seeding a MongoDB database from a JSON file using a Python seed script
• Building a scoring & matching algorithm that ranks scholarships per student profile
• React Router v7 for client-side SPA navigation across 5 pages
• Fetching API data in React with Axios and managing loading and error states
• Filtering and searching data with query parameters on the backend
• Scheduling recurring background jobs with node-cron for automated scraping
• NeDB as an embedded database fallback when MongoDB is unavailable
• NLP text processing with TextBlob for scholarship description scoring
• Managing environment variables with dotenv in both Node.js and Python
• Building a reusable ScholarshipCard component with apply/save actions
• Responsive multi-page layout with plain CSS and Google Fonts
• CORS configuration for cross-origin requests between React and Express