A student-built opportunity map
Every student deserves a north star.
Most students never hear about the research programs, scholarships, and competitions they were qualified for. Northstar starts with how you actually think and work — twenty behavioral questions — charts a course to real, ranked STEM opportunities with a reason attached to every one, and puts you next to the students walking the same route.
How you find it
01
Trait profile
Twenty prompts become six trait signals plus a field-interest map across ten fields. No black box — every score is a sum you can check.
02
Future paths
Your traits are compared against archetypes to surface three directions: the steady fit, the stretch, and the one nobody had time to suggest.
03
Real opportunities
A TF-IDF match engine ranks curated STEM programs against your interests and goals, explains every score, and maps the pathways between them.
04
Students on the same path
Team-up matches you against students whose path, fields and working style line up with yours — not by school or grade. Compare plans, split a project, or just have someone to ask. Opt-in, and you can leave at any time.
Why this exists
The opportunities were always there. The map wasn't.
A student with a college counselor hears about summer research in tenth grade. A student without one finds out it existed after the deadline, if at all. That gap is not about talent and it is not about effort — it is about who happens to be told. Northstar is built for the students nobody told, as a project of Minorities in STEM, a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
So two things are deliberate. More than four in five programs on the high-school shelf cost nothing to apply to, because a catalog full of $3,000 summer intensives is a list of things you cannot do. And every ranking shows its reasoning — the field that matched, the grade window, the tags — because a score you cannot interrogate is only useful to someone who already has an adult to interpret it.
FAQ
What is Northstar?+
A career-navigation tool for students. A short behavioral assessment builds a transparent profile of how you think and work, then turns it into future paths, real opportunities with reasons attached, and a plan you can act on.
Is this just an AI chatbot?+
No. The recommendations come from an interpretable scoring engine — every match shows the exact reasons behind its score. Nothing is a black box, and no AI decides who you are.
How much does it cost?+
Nothing. Northstar is free for students.
Where do the opportunities come from?+
Most of the high-school shelf is hand-picked and checked by a person. The rest of the catalog is gathered from public sources through official APIs and screened by an automated verifier before it enters the catalog. Either way a real program is behind every entry — nothing unverified is shown as one.