Quick Take
UC Santa Cruz computer science major William Zhao built a web tool to help his fellow undergraduates chart their careers from entry-level positions to the C-suite.
Sometimes growing up means going through an agonizing “What now?” stage, in which young people wonder how to transform an expensive college degree and all that hard work into a career.
This question gave William Zhao, a third-year student at UC Santa Cruz, the idea for CareerLoop – a web tool he created to help students figure out their future one step at a time.
The site allows users to choose from a list of possible professions, and take assessments to narrow down which jobs within that profession are best suited for them. It uses data from an applicant tracking system to identify keywords from job descriptions and analyze the skills and work experience on an existing résumé to measure how well they match a specific job listing.
The San Francisco-born website designer said growing up in what he describes as the “tech center of the world” inspired him to pursue a degree in computer science.
But when it came to options for after graduation, he struggled to understand his position in the current job market, at a moment when aspiring software engineers are competing with artificial intelligence programming tools for jobs. He found career guidance resources to be lacking, and wanted to help his peers imagine a path through a profession, from entry-level job to C-suite.
“There isn’t enough focus on the smaller, more specific jobs within this profession,” Zhao said. “I really enjoy coding and solving different problems, but there are so many different fields I could go into with computer science.”
Other career apps offer résumé-building and cover letter help, but Zhao’s goal was to help students customize their résumés to fit a specific job.
“I wanted to build a site that would follow the user throughout the entire process,” Zhao said.
While he created the tool with university students in mind, it can be used by people at all career stages.
Like most students, Zhao is still figuring out his post-graduation plans, but he hopes this project will boost his career.
“I want to keep building products that help people. Whether that means continuing with CareerLoop or starting something new, I really enjoy working on ideas that solve real problems,” Zhao said.
Zhao sees AI as a tool to improve products and automate simple tasks — in this case, making job searches more personalized.
“I actually see AI as something that can help us improve what we do,” Zhao said. “Building CareerLoop helped me apply what I learned in class to something real. It taught me a lot about how to build systems that people actually use. I also learned more about design, communication and problem-solving, which are all useful skills for any computer science career,” he said.
Zhao created CareerLoop with the help of Derek Chan, a UC Santa Cruz alum; Cody Fan, a third-year student and environmental science major at UC Davis; and David Espinoza, a computer science major from South America.
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