Creating a Social Media Application for International Students

Chukwurado Umeaka, Verrazzano Class of 2021, completed major in Computer Science Mathematics

For my capstone, I wanted to build a social media web application that would allow international students to connect and share their experiences while they were in the United States. Based on my own experience in school, I found that connecting with other international students at both CSI and other schools really helped through the challenges I faced, as we all shared similar obstacles.

Initially, I was very excited about working on this project. However, during the developing process there were many times I doubted the importance of the platform and I lacked the motivation to build it. I questioned whether an international student would even use the platform, or what would separate this social media platform from the rest. These thoughts kept lingering in my mind and it was difficult to shake them off. However, as I did more research on the impact of social media on international students, I began to realize that this was indeed a project worth pursuing.

It is no secret that there are a plethora of social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, which at their core serve the same purpose to electronically connect people and allow them to share posts. From my research, I found that while these social media applications help international students adjust to life in the United States, they have no influence on the amount of social support that international students have. One of the many reasons for this is that international students don’t feel as though their social connections would understand the issues they face since the people they are connected to will have different personal experiences because they are not international students.

Working on this project gave me the opportunity to enhance my skills as a software engineer. I utilized some of the skills that I learned from my past internships and courses, and used technologies such as React, Python and MongoDB, that are highly popular in the tech industry.  I ran into countless bugs and errors when building this project that I was forced to solve on my own. As a result, it improved my problem-solving skills, which is imperative to the success of a software engineer.

While it has been a lot of work to get this project running, I have only scratched the surface of what I have left to do. I plan to redesign the user interface of the application and deploy it to the google cloud platform or any other cloud services. Furthermore, I plan to implement the features to fulfill the minimum requirements, such as connecting and sharing posts, and include more features that tackle other international student related issues, such as housing, job hunting, and scholarships.

I had a range of emotions during my time working on this project. Nevertheless, I am glad I went through this experience because I learned so much from it. There is still so much to do, but I am up for the challenge because I know this project could positively impact the lives of the approximately one million international students in the United States.