Description

Benchwork is a job-listing site intended for university students and faculty. My team and I discovered, after conducting several interviews with university faculty, that there is a demand for students to complete small, usually one-off tasks, for university researchers. Such examples could be that a researcher needs to interface two pieces of equipment with software, or they need a student to write a program that operates a specific tool under strict parameters. With Benchwork, we created a platform where faculty can post these small tasks and students can apply for them. 

Since Benchwork was my senior project, I worked on a team with two other students for the duration of the semester to first find a problem to solve, and build a software-based solution for it, with constant planning, team meetings, meetings with the professor, deadline setting, and reporting. As a team, we decided to stick with the tech stack we were all familiar with; React with Python-Flask and SQLite3. This was done because we agreed that we would benefit more by focusing our efforts on implementing proper project management strategies rather than learning a brand-new tech stack. And we were correct, the experience I had with this project was invaluable for my career as a software engineer.