The Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) Minor gives students an opportunity to examine contemporary forms of poverty, wealth, and inequality through academic coursework and practical experience. Through GPP, students from across academic disciplines come together to think critically about issues of poverty and inequality.
The GPP Minor, housed in the Blum Center, provides students with an opportunity to study issues of poverty and inequality, along with debates about varying approaches to address these issues. Connected with their courses, students are required to volunteer or intern with an organization for at least six weeks on a poverty alleviation-focused project related to their skills and interests. Several years ago, a student working for the Blum Center created an online database to support GPP students in identifying these organizations. The database includes local and international organization information and reviews of past students’ experiences working with each organization. Students access this through their Calnet ID login. Staff have access to approving organizations and student reviews. Our existing database was set up using java, springboot and angular in a way that is difficult to maintain and lacks many features that could be useful for students to easily navigate. It has been inaccessible to students for the past year due to an error that has been difficult to fix. In Fall 2022, we had a team of two students from the Data Discovery program begin to identify how to simplify the database and make it accessible again to students. Our team has identified the best path forward is to migrate the database to Firebase (Google Cloud), and remove the Java backend. Angular would be used to create the front end.
In Spring 2023, we are seeking additional students to join our team to work on implementing this plan.
Overall, in this project, you will be able to apply your data science skills in back-end development for the GPP Organizations database. Our program has a dataset of over 150 organizations that students can partner with, but designing a database that is accessible for students and their applications is our main issue for this project. There is also potential for UX design for those interested.
