Jaden Flanery

Project 7 of 10

Eagle U Mentor Match

A mentor-matching app for a youth success program's roundtable event — ranked matches and tailored questions for every student.

LiveSolo build · used at the July 2026 Eagle U roundtablesVisit the live app

Ever sit across from someone impressive and blank on what to even ask? What if, before you met a single mentor, you already knew who to talk to — and exactly what to ask them?

See it work

Eagle U Mentor Match landing screen: first name, last initial, and group leader picker — no account needed
01

No sign-up, just go.

First name, last initial, pick your group — that’s the whole login. Built so a hundred students can jump in at once on shaky event Wi-Fi.
Eagle U Mentor Match questionnaire asking what a student is most drawn to
02

Answer a few quick questions.

A short quiz about what you’re into. It feels like it adapts to you, and quietly scores you against every mentor in the room behind the scenes.
Eagle U Mentor Match results screen showing a ranked mentor with a 97 percent match score and a plain-language reason for the match
03

See your best matches, ranked.

You get a ranked list of mentors, each with a match score and a plain reason for the fit — here, a 97% match with a retired Microsoft exec, and exactly why.
Eagle U Mentor Match tailored interview questions for a chosen mentor, each tagged strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats
04

Walk in knowing what to ask.

For each mentor you pick, the app hands you tailored questions to ask — so instead of “so, what do you do?” you open with something that actually matters.
05

Take it to the table as one printable page.

The downloadable one-page PDF a student takes to the table: the mentor's brief, the tailored questions, contact fields, and a large interview-notes box
The final step is a clean one-pager the student keeps: who the mentor is, the questions to ask, room to jot answers, and a spot to swap contact info — a single sheet to look back on long after the event.
Eagle U Mentor Match team-leader lookup: a mentor searched by name shows a plain-language brief, a rundown, and topics
06

For team leaders: look anyone up on the spot.

Team leaders fill empty seats cold, sitting down with a stranger. They read the mentor’s nametag, type the name here, and instantly get a 30-second brief and a few opening questions — a warm start with someone they’ve never met.

The goal

Eagle U is a youth success program — a week that ends with students sitting down for roundtable conversations with dozens of accomplished mentors. The problem: students walk into those rooms knowing almost nothing about the person across the table, so the first minutes burn on "so, what do you do?" and the questions stay generic.

Mentor Match fixes that. A student answers a short adaptive questionnaire, gets a ranked list of mentors with a one-line reason for each match, picks their top six, and receives interview questions tailored to their goals and each mentor's field — so the conversation is productive for both the student and the mentor from the first minute.

Two kinds of people walk into that room, and the app serves both. Students get the full flow — the quiz turns hours of research into a two-minute questionnaire and hands back a printable one-pager to carry to the table and keep. Team leaders have the opposite problem: they can't sit until every student is seated, then drop into whatever seat is open, often across from a mentor they've never heard of. For them there's a lookup tool — read the nametag, type the name, and get an instant brief and a few opening questions before they've even pulled out the chair.

Background

It ran for real at the July 2026 session at Baker University, where I came back as a Team Leader after four summers as an attendee and used it to run my own team's roundtables. It started selfishly: I wanted to walk into my own roundtables already knowing each mentor's world. Then it grew two more jobs — collapsing the research burden for every student at the event, and giving a room full of students a first-hand introduction to what AI-built software can actually do.

It's engineered for event conditions: a hundred students hitting it at once on venue Wi-Fi. The deployed app makes zero runtime AI calls — the questionnaire is a deterministic branching tree that feels adaptive, ranking is a transparent weighted overlap scored 0–100, and progress lives in the browser so a mid-event refresh loses nothing. Coordinators watch live mentor demand on an admin dashboard; group leaders get a mentor-lookup view.

Built with AI

The constraint shaped the architecture: my Claude subscription was the only paid source allowed, so the intelligence is baked in at build time instead of called at runtime. Claude enriched dozens of raw mentor bios into structured, human-reviewed records and pre-generated bespoke questions per mentor — then the deployed app runs on pure, free, deterministic code that can't be rate-limited mid-event.

The app itself was the demo: for most students, this was the first time software built by directing AI did something concrete for them — it researched the mentors so they didn't have to.

Stack

Next.jsTypeScriptTailwindSupabaseVercel