ScholarDollarz — AI Scholarship Intelligence Platform
🎓 ScholarDollarz
Live: scholardollarz.com
ScholarDollarz is an AI-powered scholarship discovery platform built to help students — especially those from underserved communities — find scholarships they actually qualify for. The platform eliminates the noise of generic scholarship searches by combining intelligent filtering, deadline tracking, and AI-verified source links.
The Problem
Most scholarship databases are outdated, inaccurate, and overwhelming. Students waste hours chasing dead links or scholarships they’re ineligible for. ScholarDollarz was built to change that.
What It Does
- 4,600+ scholarships indexed, researched, and filterable by state, eligibility, deadline, and award amount
- AI verification pipeline — NVIDIA NIM LLM validates scholarship URLs, deadlines, and eligibility details
- Smart filtering — state-aware boolean columns for precise geographic filtering without false exclusions
- Admin panel — hidden curator interface for managing scholarship data directly in MongoDB Atlas
- Deadline intelligence — upcoming deadlines surfaced automatically, expired scholarships suppressed
Tech Stack
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Backend | FastAPI (Python) |
| Frontend | Streamlit |
| Database | MongoDB Atlas |
| AI / Verification | NVIDIA NIM (meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct) |
| Search | SearXNG (self-hosted) |
| Hosting | Railway |
Engineering Highlights
- Built a bulk scholarship research tool using SearXNG feeding into NVIDIA’s LLM for structured data extraction across 4,700+ scholarships
- Implemented a three-tier URL confidence system (HIGH / LOW / DEAD) to surface link quality without removing unverified entries
- Solved a critical state filter bug using pre-computed per-state boolean columns and a reverse-exclusion approach — eliminating false negatives that blocked legitimate matches
- Migrated from CSV to MongoDB Atlas as single source of truth, enabling real-time admin edits without redeployment
- Added GitHub Actions keep-alive workflow to prevent Render free-tier spin-down
Impact
ScholarDollarz serves students across all 50 states, with a focus on making scholarship opportunity searchable, accurate, and accessible — regardless of a student’s starting point.