For the third year in a row, Divya Patel '29 and Om Popat '28 participated in the Congressional App Challenge (CAC), and this time, they took their achievement to the next level, earning 2nd place in the competition.

After placing 3rd last year, the pair set a new goal for themselves: not only to improve their standing, but to create an app with meaningful real-world impact.

“Placing 2nd in this year’s Congressional App Challenge felt incredibly rewarding,” they said. “After placing 3rd last year, we set a goal for ourselves to not only perform well at the competition but also develop a useful product that is able to be deployed for real-world use.”

At the awards ceremony with Congresswoman Madeleine Dean, they learned their new app, College Buddy, had earned them the recognition.

“We were excited to learn that we won 2nd place because of how much time and effort we put into planning and developing our app,” they said. “The victory only inspires us to work harder to achieve even greater achievements beyond this competition.”

Unlike their previous app, "Motivate Me", which focused on mental health and emotional support, this year’s project takes a more structured, future-oriented approach.

“After creating our app 'Motivate Me', we were inspired to make a tool designed for consumers of our age group,” they explained. “We wanted to help inform students of the college admissions process earlier in their high school journey.”

College Buddy is an app that uses artificial intelligence to guide students through the college admissions process. It provides personalized insights based on factors like GPA, coursework, and extracurricular activities, while also helping students organize key components of their applications.

The development of the app required significant time and technical growth. This year, Patel and Popat challenged themselves by opting to use the Swift programming language in pursuit of their goal of publishing the app.

"Our coding skills have greatly improved since last year," they said. "We spent many hours prior to the development of the app learning the language and creating test projects to help develop our skills. We learned design elements to create the UI of the app and how to integrate the Firebase and OpenAI APIs into the app." 

Beyond the competition, their goal is to make a meaningful difference for students navigating the college process.

“We hope that College Buddy will help inform high school students about the college admissions process prior to being assigned a college counselor,” they said. “We hope students feel more grounded, guided, and confident.”

Looking ahead, Patel and Popat are not done yet. They are currently working toward publishing College Buddy on the App Store and plan to return to the Congressional App Challenge next year.