Building a Recommendation System for Career Advice for Students from Professionals

The student community has always faced challenges when it comes to getting effective but free guidance with respect to career choices and advice, especially in developing or underdeveloped countries. Even in the United States of America, for every 1 academic guidance counselor, there are almost 500 students, a really skewed ratio. This large disparity leads to an increasing number of underserved students, who lack the resources to network with other professionals in their dream career roles. CareerVillage.org(https://www.careervillage.org/) is an American nonprofit organization, which seeks to fight the problem of young students being deprived of quality career advice and professional guidance. Using crowdsourced professionals to provide valuable information and guidance to students, as well as other professionals looking for a path or want to change their situations and surroundings, all free of cost [1]. We will use a number of techniques to first explore the dataset and find the themes and missing pieces within it. Then we aim to build out a robust recommendation system which can connect students looking for guidance to the professionals most relevant to their questions.