The LBJ School of Public Affairs CONNECT program is a program that matches projects hosted by select organizations within the UT community with UT graduate students looking for applied and practical experience. Currently, the matching process involves a tedious manual blind evaluation of students’ profiles and project descriptions. This matching process consumes a lot of time and effort from the CONNECT staff and isn’t scalable as the program grows. 

As a result, our team was tasked with designing a scalable matching algorithm that automates the matching process and creating an accompanying web application for students, organizations, and the CONNECT staff to access and interact with. In brief, our team developed an end-to-end web application that consists of an automated matching algorithm that eliminates human bias, an interactive user interface that seamlessly connects with our algorithm and database, and a novel resume parsing feature that utilizes natural language processing to rate resumes based on keywords.