SUN Pathways AI Platform
College and career guidance for foster youth
Led architecture and delivery of SUN Pathways, a grant-funded production web app for SUN Scholars Inc.: hosted guidance for students across schools, with FERPA and protected-class constraints, plus an operations layer for program staff.
Client
SUN Scholars Inc. / The Conrad Group
Completion
6 months
Category
Product & Impact
Situation
Youth with lived experience in foster care face steep college-completion gaps. SUN Scholars Inc. needed a centralized, hosted pipeline students at different schools could use for college and career guidance — not a one-off brochure site — while keeping education records under FERPA-aware access.
Task
Design, develop, and operate a private production platform that serves students as external users and gives program staff a durable operations workspace.
Action
→Built the student-facing app as a TypeScript stack (React, Express, PostgreSQL) with session-backed access and form validation
→Used generative AI for personalized college and career guidance inside that hosted app, not as a standalone chatbot
→Supported program operations with a CodeIgniter operations workspace, including Keycloak SSO so staff identity is not a separate pile of passwords
→Kept student and program data handling aligned with FERPA and protected-class constraints rather than a public unauthenticated site
Results
✓Secured the Youth Villages Lived Experience Impact Grant for platform development
✓Shipped a production app used by students across schools, with a staff operations layer on the same program
✓Gave The Conrad Group a regulated, multi-institution delivery pattern (education data, not internal IT tools)