Opal
Opal will be an app for college students to get matched with a mentor currently working within the student’s aspiring career path.
Problem
College students need a simple way to gain access to mentors within their aspiring career fields because they might not fully understand the job they’re going to be getting into.
Goal
The Opal app will let users pair with a mentor that best matches their career goals which will affect users who don’t have full comprehension of that career by letting users gain a professional’s viewpoint of that job’s requirements. We will measure effectiveness by tracking app usage.
User Research
A primary user group identified through this research was college students who are looking for mentors on social media platforms. This user group confirmed initial assumptions about college students, but research revealed that lack of connections wasn’t the only factoring limiting users from gaining a relationship with a mentor. Other user problems included time commitments, unreal expectations, and overdependence within the connecting with a mentor process.
Impact
Since I stopped working with Opal the app has been going through several rounds of beta testing. Other encouraging news is that Opal has partnered with Santa Clara University in doing a test run of the Opal program with the School of Engineering. As of 2017, there are an 1,000 students enrolled in the Santa Clara University School of Engineering.
