Opeyimika Aremu, Abdulqudus Ajibade, and Mujeeb Opabode, all 500-level students of the Department of Medicine and Surgery, have launched Portals, a product designed to make the acquisition of tech skills easier. These students from the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, came up with the idea for Portals after looking at the peculiar struggles they experienced in their journey to develop technical skills.
In announcements members of the team made on their individual pages on social media, they explained that the website platform works by connecting users to mentors and resources that are personalised for the background they have and the goals they intend to achieve. As stated by the member of the team in charge of marketing, “We realized that getting a roadmap that is perfectly fitting to the point where you are now and where you want to go can be ridiculously difficult. You have to check out resources trial-and-error style and ask family and friends for advice. Most times, the recommendations can be plainly wrong”.
While Portals started as an idea the team pitched in a hackathon, #OyoHackFest, which was held in Oyo town, the team has been able to build a minimum viable product that can now be accessed at http://portalss.up.railway.app.
While speaking with one of the team members on how they intend to balance the requirements of building and maintaining the platform with academic obligations, he said, “It’s not been much of an issue to balance with academics. We have always done that since deciding to upskill our technical skills. We understand that as we move between postings, the time and focus will ebb and flow, but we will commit time, focus, and effort to the product as much as we can”.
As the team tries to improve the product to suit the demand of their target audience, they implore members of the public to drop feedback about the product via this link https://bit.ly/getportals.