Launch Plan

Launch Plan helps high-school students compare careers and colleges by what they will actually cost and earn. Students use a mobile app, which went into a TestFlight pilot while I was there; schools get a dashboard; both talk to one Node API backed by Postgres and a Python financial engine that runs the projections.

I built the school dashboard from an empty Next.js shell: staff sign-in, cohort analytics, alerts and readiness views. Analytics are aggregate by default, with a minimum cohort size, so no small group of students can be singled out.

On top of that I built two-way counselor-to-student messaging. It's gated behind a FERPA acknowledgement and delivered by push notification and email, with caseload assignment, reusable templates, a weekly digest for counselors and an audit log for admins.

Reality Check is a standalone kiosk app for college fairs. A student picks a career and a college, and the financial engine reveals what that choice really costs and pays, with sliders to try other options.

It started inside the dashboard. I split it out into its own app so it could be deployed and iterated on separately.

I indexed tax brackets to each projection year, surfaced the plan's assumptions to students so they can see what a projection rests on, and fixed state-tax data errors that were quietly distorting projections for some students.

Before the pilot I took the mobile app from 675 type errors to zero, ran three accessibility passes (contrast, Dynamic Type, VoiceOver and touch targets), wired orphaned test suites back into a single run, and led a security and correctness sweep that closed 25 audit findings.