Alumnet
Team
- E/23/435, E.S Wickramasinghe, e23435@eng.pdn.ac.lk
- E/23/362, S.N.V.N Senadheera, e23362@eng.pdn.ac.lk
- E/23/340, W.H.C.C Samarasinghe, e23340@eng.pdn.ac.lk
- E/23/075, K.K Dilshara, e23075@eng.pdn.ac.lk
Table of Contents
Introduction
Universities face ongoing challenges in maintaining meaningful and structured engagement with their alumni after graduation. Currently, alumni information is fragmented across informal platforms such as social media groups, emails, and personal networks. This fragmentation makes it difficult to identify alumni by expertise, facilitate mentorship, or effectively promote university events.
Alumnet is a centralized, university-managed digital platform designed to solve this problem. It enables organized alumni engagement, structured mentorship workflows, and engagement monitoring in a secure, role-based environment.
Solution Architecture
Alumnet operates as a standalone web-based application using a 3-tier architecture:
- Presentation Layer (Frontend): Built with React.js to provide a responsive and interactive user interface for Students, Alumni, and Administrators.
- Application Layer (Backend): Powered by Node.js and Express, handling API routing, business logic, and authentication.
- Data Layer (Database): Uses PostgreSQL for persistent storage of user profiles, mentorship requests, and events.
The system is deployed on Render and uses JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for secure, stateless authentication.
Software Designs
The system is designed around five core features to ensure scalability and usability:
1. User Authentication & Role Management
Secure login with JWT-based authentication. The system supports three distinct roles:
- Students: Can search directories and request mentorship.
- Alumni: Can manage profiles and accept/reject requests.
- Admins: Manage users and events.
2. Alumni Profile Management
A centralized directory allowing alumni to create professional profiles. Students can search this directory filtering by batch, department, profession, and skills.
3. Mentorship Workflow
A structured process to formalize guidance:
- Request: Students send a mentorship request to a specific alumnus.
- Response: Alumni receive the request and can simply “Accept” or “Reject”.
- Tracking: Both parties can track the status of the connection.
4. Event Announcements
University administrators can broadcast official event announcements to all users. To avoid complexity and legal risks, the system does not handle ticket bookings or financial transactions.
5. Database Design
The database schema includes entities for Users, AlumniProfiles, StudentProfiles, MentorshipRequests, Events, and Notifications to support clear relationships and data integrity.
Testing
The verification strategy for Alumnet includes:
- Functional Testing: Verifying that each feature (e.g., login, search, request sending) functions according to the requirements.
- Security Testing: Ensuring that role-based access control (RBAC) is strictly enforced (e.g., a Student cannot delete an Event) and that user data is protected.
- Usability Inspection: Reviewing the interface to ensure that the “Accept/Reject” workflow is intuitive for alumni with varying technical skills.
Conclusion
Alumnet successfully addresses the problem of unstructured alumni engagement by providing a secure and scalable platform. The project delivers a functional directory, a mentorship workflow, and an event broadcasting system.
Future Enhancements:
- Support for multiple universities.
- Inclusion of corporate or industry mentors.
- Advanced analytics dashboards for engagement monitoring.