Active Final Year Projects Showcase

01. Problem Statement

What problem does this project solve?
If you are a student in Pakistan trying to figure out your career path, the process is genuinely exhausting. There is no single place that tells you what jobs you qualify for, which university suits your budget and grades, which scholarships you are actually eligible for, or what skills you need to build to get where you want to go. You end up jumping between five or six different websites, none of which talk to each other, and still walk away with more questions than answers.
CareerCartAI was built specifically to fix this. It is a platform that combines all of those scattered resources into one place and makes them actually useful by personalizing everything to the individual user.

The Core Problems in Detail
Pakistan has over 1.9 million university students, and yet the infrastructure to help them make informed career decisions is almost nonexistent. Here is what they are currently dealing with:

• Platform Fragmentation: A student today has to check Rozee.pk for jobs, the HEC portal for scholarships, individual university websites for admissions, Coursera or YouTube for skills, and LinkedIn for networking. None of these platforms share data, and none of them care about who you specifically are. The result is hours of manual research every week that most students simply do not have time for.
• Zero Personalization: Every job board and scholarship portal shows the same results to every user. A student from Quetta with a 2.7 GPA in Business sees the same job listings as a student from Lahore with a 3.9 GPA in Computer Science. There is no intelligence behind the results, which means users waste enormous time filtering through opportunities they have no chance of getting.
• No Access to Career Guidance: Professional career counseling is available to fewer than 5% of Pakistani university students. It is expensive, geographically limited, and mostly unavailable outside major cities. Students in Tier-2 cities like Faisalabad, Multan, or Peshawar have essentially no structured guidance at all. Decisions about what to study and where to work end up being made based on whatever a family member suggests or whatever is trending on social media.
• Skill Gap Between Education and Industry: Pakistani universities often teach curricula that are 3 to 5 years behind what employers actually want. Graduates enter the job market without knowing exactly which skills they are missing, and there is no tool that shows them in real time. This creates a painful situation where employers cannot find qualified candidates while thousands of graduates remain unemployed.
• ATS Rejection Problem: A majority of companies with more than 50 employees now use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to automatically screen resumes before a human ever looks at them. Research suggests that up to 75% of resumes get rejected at this stage, not because the applicant is unqualified, but because their resume used the wrong keywords or formatting. Pakistani students are almost entirely unaware this barrier even exists.

Why Existing Platforms Fall Short
Platforms like Rozee.pk, Indeed Pakistan, and the HEC portal each solve one narrow part of the problem, but none of them offer intelligent matching, career planning, or any kind of personalized guidance. LinkedIn requires an existing professional network to be useful, which immediately disadvantages first-generation students. Coursera teaches skills but does not tell you which skills to learn based on your specific career goal. CareerCartAI is designed from the ground up to address all five problems together in one unified platform.

04. Target Users

Who is this platform built for?
CareerCartAI is designed with a very specific audience in mind. The platform is not trying to serve everyone — it is built to serve Pakistani students and early-career professionals who are navigating decisions about education, skills, and employment, often without any professional support network to fall back on.

User Type Description & Needs
University Students (Primary) Students currently enrolled in a Bachelor's or Master's program across Pakistan — particularly those in their final two years who are starting to think seriously about employment or further education. They need job and internship recommendations matched to their academic profile, guidance on which skills to build, and help understanding what the job market actually expects from someone at their level. This is the largest and most important user group the platform is designed for.
Fresh Graduates Individuals who have recently completed a degree and are actively job-hunting for the first time. They are often unaware of how hiring systems work, what ATS screening means, or how to position their academic projects as professional experience. CareerCartAI helps them build a polished resume, discover relevant opportunities, and understand the specific skill gaps preventing them from landing interviews.
Intermediate / FSc Students Students who have just completed their intermediate-level education and are deciding which university and field to pursue. They have not yet formed a career identity and need guidance on which programs align with their interests and academic results, which universities are within their budget, and which scholarships they are eligible for. CareerCartAI's university recommendation and scholarship discovery features are built directly for this group.
Early-Career Professionals Individuals who are one to three years into their first job and realizing they want to shift direction, level up to a better role, or enter a new industry. They already have some work experience but are uncertain about what skills to develop next, whether their resume is competitive, and what opportunities match their growing profile. The Skill Gap Analyzer and Career Roadmap Generator are especially useful for this group.
Students in Tier-2 and Tier-3 Cities A cross-cutting user group that deserves special mention: students in cities like Multan, Hyderabad, Faisalabad, Bahawalpur, and Peshawar who have essentially zero access to professional career counseling. They rely on family opinions and social media for guidance that is neither personalized nor evidence-based. For these users, CareerCartAI is not a convenience — it is the only structured career guidance tool they have ever had access to.

Who benefits indirectly?
While the platform is user-facing for students and graduates, there is a broader group that benefits from the outcomes CareerCartAI produces. Employers benefit from candidates who arrive better prepared and more self-aware about their skills. Universities benefit from applicants who are genuinely aligned with the programs they are applying to, rather than applying blindly. Scholarship-awarding bodies benefit from more complete and better-prepared applications. And at a macro level, Pakistan's economy benefits from any reduction in the skills mismatch between graduates and the job market.

02. Functional Requirements

What will the system actually do?
Below are the core functionalities of CareerCartAI, described in enough detail to understand both what each feature does and why it exists. These are the things a user can actually perform inside the platform.

# Feature Detailed Description
FR-01 User Registration & Login Users can sign up using an email address and a password. Alternatively, they can use their Google account to log in instantly. Passwords must meet a basic security standard (minimum 8 characters, at least one uppercase letter, one number, and one special character). A forgot-password flow sends a reset link to the registered email that expires after 15 minutes. The system will support three user roles: Student, Professional, and Administrator, each with different levels of access.
FR-02 Career DNA Profile Builder After signing up, each user goes through a one-time structured questionnaire. This covers their current education level and field of study, a self-rating of their technical and soft skills, their target career goal, preferred cities and remote work preference, financial constraints such as minimum acceptable salary and education budget, and preferred industries. This data is saved as a personal profile and powers every recommendation on the platform. Users can update it anytime.
FR-03 Job & Internship Recommendations The system aggregates job and internship listings from curated datasets and available job sources. For each listing, it calculates an Opportunity Match Score (OMS) between 0 and 100 for the logged-in user, based on skill match (40%), location fit (20%), salary alignment (20%), experience match (10%), and deadline urgency (10%). Users see their personalized score next to each listing. They can filter by city, industry, job type, and minimum score. Each listing includes a plain-language explanation of why the score is what it is.
FR-04 Resume Upload & Profile Sync Users can upload an existing resume in PDF format (maximum 5 MB). The system reads the document and extracts information such as education history, work experience, listed skills, and certifications. This extracted data is shown to the user for review and, once confirmed, is used to pre-fill or update their Career DNA profile. Users do not have to manually enter everything from scratch if they already have a resume.
FR-05 University Recommendation Module The system maintains a database of at least 60 HEC-recognized Pakistani universities, including their available programs, entry requirements, fee structures, HEC ranking category, and campus location. Each university is scored against the user's career goal, GPA, declared budget, and preferred city. Results are displayed as a ranked list. Users can also select up to three universities and view them in a side-by-side comparison layout.
FR-06 Scholarship Discovery & Filtering The system holds a curated list of local scholarships (HEC Need-Based, HEC Merit, Ehsaas Undergraduate, PM Laptop Scheme) and well-known international ones (Chevening, DAAD, Commonwealth). Based on the user's profile, it automatically hides scholarships they clearly do not qualify for and surfaces only relevant ones. For any scholarship saved by the user, the system generates a step-by-step application checklist with required documents and a live countdown to the deadline.
FR-07 AI Career Roadmap Generator Users type a career goal in plain language (e.g., 'I want to work in cybersecurity'). The system sends this to the Google Gemini API, which returns a structured roadmap broken into 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day milestones. Each milestone tells the user what to learn, how many hours per week to invest, and which free resource to use (with a link where available). The roadmap is displayed as an interactive visual timeline. Users can mark milestones as 'In Progress' or 'Completed' by clicking on them.
FR-08 Skill Gap Analyzer Users select a target job title from a dropdown of over 500 pre-mapped roles, or type a custom one. The system compares the skills commonly required for that role against the skills in the user's profile. The output is a Skill Gap Report that classifies each missing skill as Critical (appears in over 80% of job postings for that role), Moderate (40-79%), or Minor (under 40%). The report is displayed as a color-coded chart. A free learning resource is recommended for each gap.
FR-09 Smart Resume Builder The system provides a guided resume builder with at least 5 professional, ATS-compatible templates. Users fill in sections for personal information, professional summary, work experience with bullet-point achievements, education, skills, projects, and certifications. As they type, a live ATS Compatibility Score (0-100) updates in real time, accounting for correct section headers, keyword density relative to a target job description, absence of formatting that ATS systems cannot read, and resume length. Users can paste a job description to receive keyword suggestions. The final resume exports as a clean, machine-readable PDF.
FR-10 AI Career Mentor (Chat Assistant) A persistent conversational assistant powered by the Gemini API is available on every page. Users can ask open-ended questions about career paths, interview preparation, salary expectations, or anything else career-related. When a user opens the chat while viewing a specific job listing or scholarship, the assistant automatically has that item as context, so the user can ask 'Am I a good fit for this?' without re-explaining what they are looking at. Chat history is saved between sessions.
FR-11 Deadline War Room Dashboard A centralized dashboard pulls all deadlines from every item the user has saved: job applications, scholarship deadlines, and university admission cutoffs. Items are displayed with color-coded urgency indicators: red for deadlines within 7 days, orange for within 30 days, and green for beyond 30 days. This gives users a single view to manage everything they are working toward without missing critical dates.
FR-12 Application Progress Tracker For every job, scholarship, or university the user saves, they can track their application status through clearly defined stages: Interested, Applied, Interview Scheduled, Offer Received, Accepted, and Rejected. This acts as a personal job-search management board inside the platform.

03. Non-Functional Requirements

Performance Goals
The platform needs to feel responsive even on slower internet connections, since a significant portion of the target users will be accessing it on mobile devices with 3G or 4G data in smaller cities.

• Page Load Time: Any standard page on the platform should fully load within 3 seconds on a 4G connection. API response time for recommendation results should be under 2 seconds for cached responses and under 5 seconds when generating fresh results.
• Concurrent Users: The system should be able to handle at least 200 simultaneous users without performance degradation during initial deployment, with room to scale as the user base grows.
• Gemini API Response Time: AI-generated outputs such as career roadmaps and chat responses should be displayed to the user within 8 seconds of submission. A visible loading indicator must be shown while the response is being generated.
• Resume Export Speed: A resume PDF should be generated and available for download within 5 seconds of the user clicking Export.
• Data Refresh: Job listings in the database should be refreshed at least once every 24 hours to keep opportunities current. Scholarship deadlines should be verified and updated at minimum once per week.

Security Requirements
Since the platform handles personal profile data, academic records, and resume content, user data must be protected at every level.

• Authentication Security: Passwords must be stored as hashed values using bcrypt. JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are used for session management, with access tokens expiring after 60 minutes and refresh tokens after 7 days. Google OAuth 2.0 is used for third-party login, and no passwords are stored for OAuth users.
• Data Transmission: All communication between the frontend and backend must happen over HTTPS. No sensitive data should ever be transmitted in plain text.
• Input Validation: All user inputs must be validated and sanitized on the server side before being processed or stored, to prevent SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
• Role-Based Access Control: The system must enforce access rights at the API level. Student and Professional users cannot access administrative functions. API endpoints not meant for public access must require valid authentication tokens.
• File Upload Security: Uploaded resume files must be validated for type (PDF only) and size (maximum 5 MB). Files must be scanned for basic integrity before processing. User-uploaded files must be stored in an isolated location and never executed by the server.
• Privacy: User profile data, Career DNA responses, and resume content must not be shared with third parties. The platform must clearly communicate to users how their data is used.

Scalability Requirements

• Modular Backend Architecture: The Django backend should be organized in a modular, app-based structure so that individual components (e.g., the scholarship engine or the resume builder) can be updated, optimized, or replaced independently without breaking other parts of the system.
• Database Design: The database schema must be normalized and indexed appropriately to handle growth in users and data volume without requiring structural changes. PostgreSQL is selected for its reliability and ability to handle relational data at scale.
• Stateless API Design: The backend API should be stateless, meaning each request carries all necessary authentication and context information. This makes it straightforward to add additional server instances if traffic grows.
• Cloud Deployment: The application will be deployed on a free-tier cloud platform (Railway or Render) initially. The architecture should not be tied to a single server, so that migrating to a paid hosting plan or a different provider remains simple.

UI/UX and Usability Standards

• Mobile-First Design: The interface must be fully usable on mobile devices with screen widths starting from 360px. All buttons, form inputs, and interactive elements must be large enough to tap comfortably on a touchscreen.
• Accessibility: Text must maintain sufficient contrast against background colors to meet basic readability standards. Font sizes must be no smaller than 14px for body content. All form fields must have visible labels.
• Language Clarity: All platform text, labels, and instructions must be written in plain, clear English that a first-year university student can understand without confusion. Technical jargon should be avoided in user-facing content.
• Consistent Design System: All pages must use a consistent color palette, typography, and component style so that users feel oriented as they move through the platform. Primary brand color: deep navy blue (#1F4E79). Accent: sky blue (#2E74B5).
• Error Handling: The system must display clear, human-readable error messages when something goes wrong. Messages like 'Error 500' or 'Undefined is not a function' must never be shown to users. Every error state must suggest what the user should do next.
• Onboarding Flow: New users should be guided through profile setup in a structured, step-by-step wizard with progress indicators. The onboarding experience should take no more than 5 to 7 minutes to complete.
• Profile Completeness Nudging: The dashboard should display a Profile Completeness percentage and prompt users to fill in missing sections, with a brief explanation of how each missing section affects their recommendation quality.